Ha! That article made me laugh. Do you know why? It's because of the way I found it.

I had heard about this Sharepoint thing, and wanted to find out what it was all about. Maybe it would be something for us.

Google took me to Microsoft's web site, where I read the same uninformative garbage that's quoted in the article. Rather than waste my time wading through all of that nonsense, I decided to do what I usually do: Find somebody else on the web who can explain Microsoft's things in plain language. And that quickly led me to this article.

Finding information on SharePoint 2007 shouldn't be a difficult task. In fact Microsoft has been publishing information to a variety of audiences since the product reached its public Beta 2 status almost 6 months ago.

For those looking for general information on the functionality and improvements of the product, a great deal of information can be found on the site that Microsoft has dedicated to the product:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/default.aspx

From this site there are links to a product guide featuring a walkthrough of a lot of the new functionality:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101680161033.aspx

For those looking for more technical details, there have been several webcast, screencast and training series from both the IT and Development perspective on the platform for the last 6 months.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/technetoffice.mspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/server/moss/2007/learn/

And of course there are a number of product team specific weblogs posting regular updates of information.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

The above links should save you some searching if you genuinely do want information on the product.

Of course a quick search on your own site uncovered a few articles you may wish to check out as well.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/25/78606_22OPenterwin_1.html

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/36OPenterwin_1.html

Of course naturally if reading the above information or test driving the software yourself still does not provide you with the answers you need, please feel free to drop me a line. I have accumulated quite a few resources over the past 12 or so months I have been playing with product myself. In addition to the information provided by Microsoft, there is a thriving community full of resources to help point anyone serious about learning in the right direction.

Cheers!
Amanda

A couple of small points I would also like to make.

1. Don't confuse the ability to do many things, with being confused as to what it can do.

2. A small comment to your quote "It's relatively easy to set up for a small workgroup and allows you to do...not much, but you can share documents."

You fail to mention that Windows SharePoint Services also gives the average business user the power to create dynamic websites with a few mouse clicks, without ever having to write a single line of code or having any technical knowledge about websites.

These websites are often used within organizations to help teams collaborate better on projects by sharing information which can include documents.

If you are looking for what clarification on what SharePoint "is" - my personal and very non-official opinion would be:

It's simply the nexus of organization when it comes to managing information in the workplace. Let's face it, there's a whole lot of information out there which needs organizing.

While everyone is certainly entitled to an opinion, I cannot help but feel this topic may not have been fully investigated prior to this post.

A couple of points:

1) Don't confuse the ability to do many things with being confused about which it can.

2) To comment on your comment "Allows you to do...not much, but you can share documents through a lightweight portal."

You failed to mention that Windows SharePoint Services also gives users the ability to create dynamic websites with a couple of clicks, no technical knowledge or code required.

These website are then often used to help teams collaborate better on projects - one small portion of which is often sharing, and collaborating on documents.

If you are looking for a "What is SharePoint" statement, my very personal and un-offical opinion is;

SharePoint is a platform for organizing information within the enterprise. A platform which can be molded to suit almost any organizations corporate culture.

Let's face it there is a lot of information out there which needs managing, and organizing which might account for it's rapid adoption

It's collaborative software, or groupware, like Lotus Domino, not a hard concept to get your head around really, though I agree marketing people can have trouble keeping things simple for the non-technical and non-marketing among us!

I've been tasked with getting myself trained as a Sharepoint 2007 power user, and then setting up in-house training for other corporate power users. I can't find a single seminar geared toward the power user (one company, Mindsharp, lists it as part of its offerings, but doesn't seem to ever schedule the actual training). For developers or sys admins, there's training up the wazoo; and there's some very basic introductory training for end users; but for corporate employees (business analysts, executive assistants, mid-level managers, etc.) for whom Sharepoint should become an integral business tool, I'm just coming up with nothing. Does anyone know of a 2 or 3 (or more) day intensive training for power users?

FWIW, I've found that Microsoft rarely lays out exactly what a particular product actually "is."

I remember, when we migrated from ccMail to Exchange 5.5, trying to wrap my head around Exchange. Sure, I knew it was email but what else did it do? Cutting through the PR sales pitch to form a mental paradigm of what was there, why, and how it fit together was pretty tough until we actually got it up in a test environment and groped around for awhile....Its a good thing that Microsoft typically makes things easy to install because that seems to be the best, and sometimes only, way to actually grok a particular product of theirs.

IMHO, Sharepoint Rocks!

Its a way for IT to enable end-users to webify their work without requiring technical depth from the users. It helps virtualize access to data. It allows users to interact with others via the web to produce shared content. Its all about collaboration and dissemination of information.

SharePoint is Microsofts attempt to get into the enterprise search space. It's a play at google and basiclly information mamangement. IT sucks.