We have been using Sharepoint for quite a while now. We have build a very customized Intranet and Extranet based on Sharepoint. We have build great blog and wike sites, which it helped our project teams more effectively collaborate. The Extranet was featured as a Microsoft case study.  

However, my honest opinion is that Microsoft has still a way to go. At this point in time there should be no difference between accessing a Sharepoint site and using basic functionality (downloading images from a image gallery or editing a wiki) from a MAC or a Windows system. Effective editing is only possible using the 3rd party editor from Telerik. Filtered RSS feeds are not possible. Wiki breadcrumbs are unusable. Not to talk about the missing support.

- Dieter

Obe feature that I'd really would like to have when working with lists is a concatination function between columns, i.e. one column would show selected values depending on slected values in another column. So far the only way I've been able to achieve this is to use InfoPath schema but it would be very useful to have this function directly on lists.

/Tom Gullberg

Never let people customize the defaults - use the style sheets etc but never alter the base code.

Every customized site breaks when going to the next version and must all be redone again.

SP fails to never lives up to its marketed potentional / function in a Government org since they follow different governance rules (policy and security) and SP breaks all of them in order to be functional. Thus they are all disabled and useless for any (Federal) agency. Leaving it as a storage area glorified Blog of useless stuff.

FORCE people to come up with categorization, areas, classification, and structure of the whole system before allowing anyone to see it. Once deployed no one will every classifiy anything unless forced onto them. Then it becomes a storehouse of stuff that you will never find again. (Think the last scene of "Raiders of the Lost Arc" when it is being put into a wharehouse never to be found again.)

Never organize SP according to the current business strucuture - organize it by functions and let each function have its own site and then have a changable global menu that can be rerferenced (Server side include) from a central site to do the site naviation. Thus as things are reorged the sites still function and locations don't change - the users just change the org name seen on the page and org codes and all is well. use generic names - finance, shipping, receiving, IT, Help Desk etc, don't use phrase of the year to name a site - you can never rename it.

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Sharepoint's list is the fundamental object where data are stored; document library, forms, calendars, wikis, image library are built from is very useful. However, it does not provide column access control. So if you wanted it to use it to represent an approval data, it will not work because the person who creates it can aslo approves it.

By providing column access control, (i.e. determine who can access what at what time), you can use it to define workflows and build countless business processes as easy as building a list. We created this feature and now are using it for many of our projects. Check out http://www.webparts360.com to learn more about dynamic interface.

I am appraoching MOSS 2007 and SharePpoint from the standpoint of a first time installating and the more i learn about SharePoint the further away get from actually being able to implement it as there is so much indirect " Non SharePoint " infrastructue needed before you can deal with SharePoint. For example moving from a non domain based network to domain based, implementing AD (and all that goes with that  plus establishing dns and namepsaces, that will reflect urls in sharepoint sites instead of server names). There should be more info dedicated to this, how to implement MOSS 2007  starting from zero i.e a server not even taken out of the box leading to the network infrastructure land onto  planning installation, implementation, set up etc.

There also needed to be more detailed examples about each little feature how you can use it and how others are using it. Other real world examples help you in your own environment , see something you like then you start thinking I could use that in this site etc.