Acronym

Tyler, great comments. I can't help but feel you are right. RIMS has embarked on a MOSS implementation and so far i'm really not impressed. SharePoint has definitely been designed for "for-profits" with little consideration to membership based organizations. While it's true that it can pretty much do anything, the level of customization is painful. What we need is a MOSSBOX - Moss - out of the box solution. With the level of complexity that sharepoint comes with, I can't see it happening in the near future.

Andy

I've been working on a SharePoint deployment for about six months and have to agree about its level of difficulty - both in terms of getting the features to work and customizing it. But as far as I know there is no association tailored package out there offering such an integrated Web 2.0 platform.

We have a web-facing SharePoint application that is a nice experiment featuring a blog, calendar, document and picture libraries. It's a good platform to get our feet wet, but each of those things could be done better through other solutions. Meanwhile our internal SharePoint application is booming - there are now seven high-level groups in the association using sites to collaborate, and as its utility becomes apparent more of our committees are getting interested.

So it has been a ton of work, and the returns are beginning to show. But so far there's little tangible investment to speak of. Our applications are running on Windows SharePoint Services (free software), and aside from one day of consulting help we've managed it entirely in-house. Although staff time is clearly the biggest expense, I can say from doing most of the work that it's been a huge learning experience - and how do you measure that?

We are entering an upgrade process though, and will be looking at adopting a robust collaborative platform for the long term. Whether or not that will be MOSS will depend on a cost-benefit analysis and thorough review of other products on the market.

I think anything can happen in 2008. Social networking was the catch phrase of '07, and a robust integrated platform seems like the holy grail du jour for association tech gurus. Microsoft could bolster SharePoint with useful add-ons, either directly or through a proxy like CodePlex. Third party vendors could develop packaged solutions built on top of SharePoint. Or competing platforms could emerge.

It's not really what I would call a backlash. But some air will certainly be let out of the heady expectations, hopefully to be replaced by realistic time frames for actualizing our next generation online services.

Thanks for your comments. Great to hear what the reality is on the ground. Any thoughts on what would be the most useful SharePoint add-ons for associations?

Similar to Jason's comments earlier, our organization implemented the SharePoint Services first and are embarking on piloting SharePoint 2007 in Q1 2008. We piloted using Services as a technology project management tool to increase the transparency of IT projects to our business units. That's been hugely successful by putting our requirements in one spot for collaboration, issues lists, change requests, discussion forums, calendaring, project tasks/status, and even a wiki to show our users how to use SharePoint. With this success, we are getting requests all over the place to get this into our our business units for their own group's purposes outside of IT project management. The basics have worked for us, and now we're ready to get more advanced. Lots of real world applications exist for us, but we will need to work with the business units on a rollout plan before getting too far. Our IT group will go through the first learning curve of the full-blown version.