What’s SharePoint anyway?  |  July 4, 2008  

I was in a discussion with some folks today who were expressing concerns about the limitations in SharePoint (as it comes out of the box). They wanted to do things that were possible, just not native with SharePoint (meaning coding would be involved). There were a bit confused about the limitations about what's possible and what's available, since SharePoint has products that are a framework for creating composite applications and can use capabilities like Silverlight, workflow and mashup tools like Popfly.

There was also an interesting effort trying to categorize MOSS as a web 2.0 collaboration tool or some other "application" category. I will not get into the gory detailed discussion that SharePoint is a category of tools itself (e.g., MOSS, WSS). Using the term SharePoint without a qualifier of what SharePoint product you're talking about is just confusing.

I finally said that "almost everything from Microsoft is really a toolkit. What they provide with MOSS (or any of the Office products for that matter) is a set of examples of what you could do. The rest is up to you." Your mileage may vary...

That is why there is such an active third party market around all the Microsoft tools. If you (as a developer) want to work at it, you can make it do almost anything you can image. A similar concept is true for open source tools, just at a finer grained level.

I've just not seen a good open source tool with similar capabilities to SharePoint.

Charlie Bess
EDS' Next Big Thing Blog