On the 22nd I had the opportunity to attend a Sharepoint seminar at Microsoft's office in Malvern, PA. The instructor was Jim Mullennix from RDA Corp and he did an awesome job of reviewing for us some of the various ways that Sharepoint sites can be programmed, using Front Page or Visual Studio 2003.

When I last looked at Sharepoint I felt that it was too development-intensive. Back around year 2000 I was working as a web administrator. The company intranet when I started was a collection of individual front page sites and was a lot of work to administer. I wanted a solution that would accomodate the dozens of groups that wanted a presence on the intranet and reduce the amount of administration that I had to do.

I looked at Sharepoint and a solution that was distributed by SAP at the time. Both seemed to require a lot of administration and to have a learning curve that I judged too steep for the folks who would be updating the group sites, so I ended up rolling my own content management system.

Since that time, Sharepoint has matured and is now robust and easy to use. It now not only provides the ability for users to easily publish content to an intranet site but also incorporates such features as version control, approval flows and a flexible web-based survey system. Moreover, developers can create web reports and forms which can be incorporated into sharepoint sites, and templates can be created to ensure that the various sites on an intranet retain the same look and feel.

I'm looking forward to working more with Sharepoint, and to Sharepoint 2007 which will be compatable with VS 2005.