Comments on: SharePoint Magic

By: Toronto Home For Sal

Toronto Home For Sal — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:54:00 +0000

I am in no way associated with 37signals beyond being a paying customer but I would recommend anybody who need online collaboration to evaluate the solutions. Its not big and fancy but it makes your distributed teams much more productive

By: sharron

sharron — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:32:06 +0000

Hi Brad, keep us updated on your experiences..its always interesting to read hands on articles. You might want to read Jennifer Neumanns articles on SharePoint at http://www.finalcandidate.com/en/tandp/Pages/default.aspx

By: Nari Kannan

Nari Kannan — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:00:28 +0000

We have built a lightweight workflow system that integrates with Microsoft Sharepoint Portal using their web parts integration interfaces. As far as API’s go SPS seems to be working just fine!

We found a need for simple solution that combined simple workflow with simple document management and other features like Discussions with replies for globally distributed colloborative work. Companies seemed to be struggling with heavy workflow solutions + heavy document management solutions but what they needed was a simpler smaller hammer for a smaller sized nail.

So far we have not been disappointed! For API’s to work properly is no small feat and SPS seems to be there almost!

By: Barnaby James

Barnaby James — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:27:30 +0000

I’m fairly sure that Microsoft Office Live Basic is already a hosted version of Sharepoint Services 2007.

By: Niels

Niels — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:08:06 +0000

Hey Brad,

reading you blog (in)frequently and even-though I dont know your exact needs let me share my 2 cents as I have been interested in and working with this collaboration topic as an end user for a while:

I’ve been using Sharepoint/STS/SPS on/off since back in 2000ish and have not found it to be working that well. Through various companies me/our primary needs were around collaboration and some level of task/project management with minimum overhead for participants. Our/my main complaints around S:
- The doc share only works (partially) well on win clients with office apps.
- WebDav issues for non win clients
- Version control not easy to use
- To-do lists,etc not user-friendly – just takes too much effort to work with them

So what’s the alternative: Since mid-2006 I’ve been using basecamp (37signals.com) and I must say this is exactly what we were looking for:
- No fancy features, just “bare-bones” functions but still meeting to 80/20- rule.
- Focus on productivity instead of fanciness (layout however is still clean and effective)
- online doc share: Forget heavy office docs – simple markup-text files with built-in version control,etc (and if you need it still can share files)
- RSS feeds.
- APIs for those who need to do fancy stuff.

Thanks for a informative blog – will continue to check back as often as time allows..

Niels

(PS: make the edit comment box larger – it is too painful to re-read and fix typos…