It's Microsoft's fastest growing product and tons of people use it, but it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain. What exactly would you say it does?
What's up with all the MS hate? This thread reads like a Slashdot thread and not an HN thread. Pardon me, I feel that the OP is not sincere. He already has a preconceived notion (OP quote, 'it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain') about the product and wants to reinforce it.
Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it, it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users.
Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned.
Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously.
Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a little bit before you can start customizing the portal.
Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer.
Crappy is certainly a preconceived notion, but 'what does it actually do?' is valid criticism/complaint. Read over these comments. It seems to be pretty hard to explain clearly.
Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better (office integration is obviously much better on SP). Also you can get pretty impressive Confluence/Sharepoint integration.
Also if you're already using Domino platform in house - you could go the Lotus Connections + Quickr way - getting full Open Office (Symphony) integration.
Both these solutions being much cheaper AND more extensible than SharePoint. Plus collaboration capabilities of Atlassian or IBM solutions being much better than SP's
Don't get me wrong - I believe that SP is pretty good - just not for an IT company with tech savvy users - it would be probably better to look somewhere else.
We do have SP in our company, we also have lots of other stuff - we use JIRA for issue tracking for example. I also spent quite some time evaluating Confluence. And what I figured out was that getting to integrate whole of our infrastructure and different existing document repositories (they're all over the place technologically and physically) would be way easier and more flexible using Atlassian suite.
That's because we work on so many different platforms (.Net, Domino, Java, Oracle, MSSQL,...). And since SP is very typical of MS software (great integration with anything MS - and other stuff does not exist) - for our situation an principal/technology agnostic system is much much better in the long run.
But as far as non-geeks go in monolythic MS stack companies - ofcourse SP is AWESOME :)
I have no experience with Atlassian products but I would like to note that for Atlassian install version, you need to have J2EE application server which could be a deal breaker for an MS shop.
Second, what about extensibility? Does Atlassian provide a way to customize the installation?
I don't understand why installing an Tomcat on Windows could be a deal breaker?
As far as extenisbility goes... There are loads of plugins available for free. Giving you an ability to extend your Wiki with social oriented features, different UI customisations, you get remote API, you can add widgets (they are going to make the Shindig an integral part of Confluence) or embed whole pages.
If you want to pay a reasonable price you can buy payable plugins: Gliffy, Sharepoint Connector, Balsamiq,...
Did I mention that Atlassian products stack together super nicely (being able to view your JIRA issues on documentation pages in wiki is superb).
Using the stack mentioned above will basically give you all the tools you need for all your documentation creation and collaboration needs costing you about 10.000$ for a 500 man company.
From what I've seen so far it's the Atlassian that are driving the whole WEB 2.0 Enterprise collaboration game - with IBM and MS trying to follow - but Atlassian is just too fast so far IMHO.
For 10$ each you can get: JIRA (issue tracker), Confluence (wiki & collaboration platform), GreenHopper (Agile tools), Bamboo (Continuous integration), FishEye (Adding UI and functionality to: SVN, CVS, Perforce, Git) and Crowd (user management)
So if you're a sub 10 man company (or need only as many licenses) you can hardly beat that for 60$ a year :).
Disclaimer: I am NOT working for Atlassian and I am NOT affiliated to them in any way - I am not even an customer (because our pointy haired bosses don't trust anything that doesn't cost an arm and an leg and isn't sold to them by sleazy MS or IBM salespeople).
No, I do not work for Microsoft or do Sharepoint consulting for a living. As I wrote in my post, I have used Sharepoint Intranet at my last project and found it to be a very useful software. I have no experience in sourcing/customizing/deploying Sharepoint, I am strictly speaking as an end user.
SharePoint is essentially an HTML + JScript + MSIE-DOM interface to a network file share full of MSOffice documents. It's a modular ASP.NET application with some modules that help you use the Web to emulate the shared folder setup your IT middle-managers know and love. There are some minor modules, such as a lame survey system. There are hooks for integrating with InfoPath for simple form <-> database apps, and WWF for "workflow" (state machine), and SAP for ... ERP goodness I guess.
It is a very, very easy way to build document-centric internal applications for enterprises that use .DOC and .XLS files (meaning, every enterprise). It's popular for exactly the same reason Access was popular: it drastically reduces the cost of basic business applications.
Normal everyday people don't get much direct benefit from it, although they do benefit indirectly:
* They don't have to implement business processes by "mailing form 3021-C to Clara in Purchasing"
* It sets a lowest common denominator for bizapps that is better than what enterprises get from bespoke .NET and J2EE dev.
You work for a large company with IT locked down, and this is the one "collaboration platform" available to you. Oh, but no Sharepoint Designer for you, my friend, if you want to make it do real tricks it will be with emacs (assuming you have jumped through the nine rings of fire to obtain permission for cygwin).
If you work in an environment that makes heavy use of Microsoft technologies (specifically, Office features), then it makes doing collaborative stuff with them easier. Its value depends on how much you buy into that.
In a word, it is a CMS. But being from Microsoft, you know it has to be excessively complicated. So take Drupal, but build it with IIS, ASP.NET, Microsoft SQL Server, XSLT and Search. Make sure you throw in plugins that make it manage Microsoft Office documents very well, with hooks into things like Outlook, and there you have it. It's nice because it has lots of features, but the flip side is it's prone to break down with no way to restore from backup because the restore process is so complicated. It also gets lots and lots of patches every month. Takes up so much memory and CPU that you actually need a farm of them and that's where the complications really start. If you can stick to a single server and small workgroup it's usable. If your company has more than two dozen people in it, you're in for a full-time job to keep the thing working.
I really don't want to mention our product again on the same page, but you mentioned Drupal, which is what we built our, I guess I have to say, Sharepoint alternative: OfficeMedium ( I won't spam another link on the same page )
I think we're on the same page though: Simplicity is key.
Does OfficeMedium have samba sharing or similar feature so documents can be added without uploading via a web interface? I've been looking for a good content management system for my job. Alfresco ( http://www.alfresco.com/ ) seems to present itself as a shared drive on user's PC but it doesn't do events + calendaring that OfficeMedium seems to support.
It is usually sold as a way to make Office collaborative. It also has a set of badly implemented other features which allow it to check boxes on product comparison feature lists.
It also sucks.
It sucks like Microsoft products used to suck, back when Microsoft was evil, not just irrelevant.
Did you ever use Windows 3.1? It's roughly that level of quality - crashes frequently, is difficult to navigate and relies on people begging others to do things that should be easy ("can you upload this document because I can't find the correct place").
As a specific example, one of the primary use-cases for it involves a person uploading a word document, and then other finding it. The problems with uploading are numerous, but we'll ignore them for the moment (sufficient to say that depending on which version of Word you have you may or may not be able to save directly to the Sharepoint repository, and of course it might crash while saving, losing anything you have done). The real problem is the search - by default it only searches on office metadata, so finding "Template for xxx" is no problem, but unless everyone correctly sets up their metadata you can never find the documents. Apparently it can be reconfigured to index content as well, but at in the first place I came across it I found it more effective to build my own search index by crawling the webdav directly structure (That was in Java, with NTLM authentication, extracting text from MS office document - so that shows how "easy" it was). The company used that index for years, because Sharepoint was so sucky.
Sharepoint sucks - I hope Google Wave kills it, but if you are doing a start up aimed at it please, please, please succeed!
(And I didn't have admin rights, so I did what I could to work around the problems)
If the problem was not the installability then you fail to mention the antecedent to "the problems" in your post. I think it was a reasonable conclusion from what you wrote that you were "installing software and had problems because of permissions".
I wasn't saying you were wrong to install it, some corporate environments require workarounds themselves!
Sharepoint is only really utilised because it comes as part of Microsoft's enterprise package. More often than not it is recommended/purchased by the IT department solely, without any other input from management. Large companies can expect massive seat-based licensing costs in the millions, year long implementation timelines and poor uptake rates. I will probably get downvoted but I speak the truth. People should be fired for their choice.
Wait, let me clarify that. I haven't got to Google Wave and I don't know anything about SharePoint. So, if someone could point out their main common features (and/or differences), I'll greatly appreciate that.
It is something that managers love, and admins hate. It is an over-engineered mess that doesn't do what you'd expect it to do, but does a lot of what you don't need it to do. After supporting it for two years, I was happy to drop it for several other solutions that combined did what Sharepoint is supposed to do properly. I know, this was a non-answer.
Based on the implementation at my workplace, SP seems to have value as a hybrid intranet site and file share. Each department has their own section in which non-IT folks can create simple HTML content and can attach documents. It is also relatively simple to share this content with other groups as needed, based on membership in Active Directory groups.
More controversially, SP also seems to be replacing MS Access as the non-IT-sanctioned application platform of choice. Instead of creating Access databases on a file share, people use SP "lists" to store data. The controversy stems from the fact that these lists often outgrow the practical limits of SP and need to be migrated to "real" systems.
Many people also seem to want to use SP as a Content Management System or even as the preferred application development platform (in which all application functionality is delivered as SP "web parts", which plug in to SP pages). These uses seem to cause as many problems as they solve, but that's just my opinion.
"Instead of creating Access databases on a file share, people use SP "lists" to store data"
This seems like a better situation than with Access though; at least the Sharepoint list apps are all located within one system; not as discrete files that may be scattered across laptops, desktops, email accounts and server shares, with who knows how many versions.
Agreed, and SharePoint tends to be backed up on the DBMS backup schedule, which is usually more frequent than the file-share/NAS schedule, which is another bonus.
It's the "non-sanctioned" aspect that tends to cause issues down the line, not moving to SharePoint from MS Access. I could've been more clear in that section of my comment.
Think of it as a document posting, storage, and workflow system, where documents can be plan text or html, or any kind of office doc.
So, for instance, you can easily set up a web form for people to fill out to get a service, then set up the routing for that form to get approved, checked, and added into the corp database.
Or a doc could be a blog, with threaded comments. Or a catalog system, with ordering and inventory.
People have different theories of software. There's 37 Signals and then there's Microsoft's.
I'm not a huge fan, but I acknowledge that it does a lot. It's Microsoft's server strategy for the next decade or so, most likely: a place where office docs can live and move around in automated business processes. That means it has a learning curve -- a learning curve that most users will never climb. Which means yes, it's going to suck for a lot of people.
As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in theory, but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like it or not, based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score better than those without.
I don't especially like this situation, but there it is. Simply complaining about it is not going to make it go away.
> As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in theory, but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like it or not, based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score better than those without.
That is, in itself, a very interesting observation. Reminds me of PG's talk on Viaweb and the use-case for their template language: "users always
want an upgrade path, even though as a rule they'll never take it."
It allows companies to build knowledge portals for their organizations. It provides building blocks in the form of wikis, forums, and knowledgebases to achieve this goal. If you've ever used Community Server you'd find Sharepoint very similar.
I believe it also includes document repositories, collaboration, and syncing, and is tightly integrated with the Office suite.
Its clunkly and Microsoftish to be sure, but its here, it works, and its been deployed across many huge organizations. Implementing a knowledge portal is often a culture and process problem more than a software problem, and its here that Microsoft has excelled with Sharepoint.
Its easy to write off to be sure, being made by MS and decidely "1.0", but this is the big brand alternative to collaboration tools like Dropbox, Etherpad, and yes, Google Wave.
It's basically groupware: document sharing, content management and messaging, ideal for those already working in a MS environment.
I was just mentioning to someone that over the last couple of years a lot of the government sector jobs that used to read "ASP.NET/C#" now say "SharePoint." I'm assuming COTS is being mandated as a cost-saving measure.
I don't really know what sharepoint is, so my viewpoint is that of an outsider, but what I can gather from what I've read about it, it seems to be the inspiration (or one of the inspirations) for Google Wave. Also pretty much any job listing in I.T. seems to mention it.
It's like describing .NET before it was released. WTH is it? Here's a theorem I'd like to posit. If you can't clearly describe a MS product, I'd say that it's something to stay away from, for those of you that run your own businesses and can make those decisions.
In addition to the good comments here, it seems that this is a way to do collaboration within an enterprise without having to deal with DBAs and other highly managed federations. It is an end-around to a lot of those.
As to why they don't look to free alternatives, in MS enterprise shops, that question never comes up.
Finally, it makes it pretty hard to move away from MS if you have your whole corporate consciousness embedded in sharepoint.
I didn't expect this thread to grow to 56 comments. Here's what astounds me: Sharepoint is Microsoft's fasting growing business ever. Faster than windows or office. It's also a source of 1 bil+ revenue a year. YET, comments from 40+ educated people who know technology very well cannot explain its purpose or real value. This is or something like it is what opportunity is supposed to look like.
I had a small team that needed to share documents related to a consulting project. Everybody needed to use MS products, access it from the web, be able to check-in/check-out files, have a common calendar, a team blog, and a quick wiki for client-related information.
Sharepoint did all of that, in an integrated fashion, right out of the box. We got it hosted for about 30 bucks a month.
In addition, everything is an RSS feed. So as people change things on a thread you're watching, you can catch it right in your RSS reader.
Even SharePoint services built into server 2003/2008 is pretty usable out of the box. You can spend a few hours to a few days to get it configured depending how much tweaking you do (and how screwed up your servers and environment are already :-p). The newer version has pretty tight integration with office. It beats throwing everything in public folders since they are less flexible and harder to manage. It also beats people emailing big files around saying "Here, print this 20MB PowerPoint for me."
If you have a few offices or remote users it is really useful. Probably not even worth considering for less than 15 people and only if you have some existing infrastructure. For smaller teams a hosted solution or some of the other products mentioned might be a better fit. (123together.com and intermedia both are OK for hosted SharePoint/exchange etc) Also, the blog and wiki stuff is still sub-par but the check-in check out stuff for documents does work pretty well.
I hate to come off like a fanboy, but I understand what Microsoft is trying to do with SharePoint and it makes sense to me.
I had another team that was just 2 or 3 guys working on a startup. We used basecamp and were very happy with it.
It depends on what you want and what your skill level is. If you're highly distributed and do a lot with Microsoft documents, then MOSS is a logical choice (and not extremely expensive). If you're just a couple of guys kicking around some code? Hack something together or use one of the simpler tools available on the web.
I'd draw the line somewhere around 4 or 5 guys, not 15 -- if you're doing something that's document-heavy. If it's just programming? I wouldn't consider it until I reached the 8-10 person team size, at least.
We're running Intranet DASHBOARD. It's an incredibly cost effective Australian-made product. When you're quoted upwards of $1 mil for Sharepoint licenses you'll understand.
We use Sharepoint in our university as a place for teachers to store documents for students to download. It also serves as a portal for accessing lots of information for different departments in the school. I work in a Chinese university and Sharepoint is one of the few MS products the school actually pays for. They must pay for the license if they want any support, thus it must be a huge cash cow for MS in a country where most software is pirated.
Sharepoint does a reasonable job at being a MS-centric document management system, providing team collaboration spaces and being a traditional intranet.
But for everything else that it claims to be is just a huge tease.
- It can be a CMS, but it's the worst, most inflexible, non-standard compliant one you can imagine.
- It can be a development platform for corporate applications. But unless you're doing something that is ultra-simple and very close to out-of-the-box, it's just not worth your time. Plus the whole development process is one big hack (need Windows server, SharePoint, IDE on the same machine, position every object manually, batch job here, keygen there, restart SP/IIS all over the place, etc)
- Business users are able to create small business apps and workflows - but they'll be a complete mess and everyone will become frustrated with the bugs, limitations and idiosyncrasies when using them.
- You can do workflows - but the out-of-the-box workflows suck, SPD workflows have way too many limitations and custom workflows are a big pain and alot of work.
- It is enterprise-y... but it has lots of non-enterprise "features". Deleting your workflow history after 3 months, updating everything single document with the latest datestamp when doing a service pack, broken import/export features.
Sharepoint is typical blasé Microsoft all-things-to-all-people collaborative communications software. Unfortunately most alternatives also lack inspiration.
You can't build an entire application from within a user interface with CouchDB. Access was both a crappy database and a simple interface for putting front-ends on that database.
Of course you can build an entire application within CouchDB, with just a tiny bit of bootstrapping. It ships with a very nice browser/editor, so you can store server-side JS as documents in the database, and have a stub that evals them.
All that's missing is 280North's Atlas.
Also, as someone who has to maintain such a thing, Access is a mediocre interface for putting frontends on databases.
From the user side, two things that particularly annoyed me were:
* The search was unusuably bad. One of the worst searches I've ever used.
* The document versioning may, if you're a programmer, lead you to believe it works like source control. Then you delete a document and find there's no way to retrieve it short of reinstalling an entire sharepoint backup to a spare machine and extracting just the file you were interested in.
As someone who's overseeing a rather huge implementation of SharePoint 2007 - and as a former user of Confluence - I have to say that SharePoint does pretty much what Confluence does (wiki, document sharing and versioning, calendaring) except that SharePoint has far more overhead. SP setup and deployment is highly complex, and it's very difficult for most users to fathom, requiring hours of training. SharePoint does have some unique capabilities (e.g. Office Suite integration - as long as you're on Windows using IE - and only half of my audience meet that requirement), but overall Confluence wins hands down IMHO.
I've been an SP user and was also involved in a few projects.
From a users perspective I see SP as no more than the "My Documents" folder moved to a browser. Sure, documents are now accessible to others, but SP does not solve the problem of explaining what the status of the document is. So you find someone else's doc, but you still may have to call or email to figure out if the doc was sent to customers, accepted, etc. As a document management platform, SP brings nothing new to the table.
Company functions like internal IT support, HR, etc. can easily setup simple workflows, and ticketing systems. In my opinion, this is the single best thing of SP and super valuable.
As a tech guy, I would never choose SP. First of all I find it too expensive, and second, the lock-in pitfalls of expensive upgrades and hours and hours of consulting to develop simple changes are just too risky (if it was my money).
So I agree with others in these comments, SP tries to do too much (and even more in the 2010 version), and the IE only thing just pisses me off.
(you can actually use other browsers, but I found that some of the config stuff can only be done in IE)
After reading through all of the comments left here about what it does, how it does it and the pros/cons of it, I was left wondering what would be a capable alternative to it. Sure, I can implement a chat system, a wiki and a blogging plaform separately, but each platform will stand apart from the others. Having a single method of login will require additional programming and administration skills in addition to time spent actually implementing them.
I'm currently analyzing the possibility of implementing SharePoint at work (small office, 5 people counting myself) but do dislike the fact it would only enhance format lock-in. Walking away from Microsoft products is not a possibility since pretty much every single document we come across is created on Microsoft software, except for PDF documents; what I would like is increase workgroup capabilities, regardless of document format.
So, what would be a decent alternative to it? I've seen most PHP-based systems and have always been left wanting.
Seriously? If everybody is already using MS docs (excel, word, powerpoint, access, xpath) and you're all on Office 2007,go ahead and use SharePoint. But be prepared to have somebody take 40 hours or so and read 2-4 books on maximizing Sharepoint capabilities. That person will have to handhold everybody else for a while. If you don't want to do that, it's not worth your time.
There are lots of hosted Sharepoint solutions you can find that aren't very expensive. They handle the backups, hotfixes, versioning, and such, and you guys just worry about your business.
That's much easier than trying to glue together several other services from separate providers, in my opinion. I'm not a MS fanboy, but Sharepoint does seem to be a logical progression from Office to something more web-centric.
I've been using Sharepoint for 3 months so far on a big ($100M+) government contract project. Our prime is hosting it. I'm not a fan, but I don't maintain it and it does the job.
The most use I've gotten out of it so far is for document management and document peer reviews. It IS convenient for editing Office 2007 documents if you're on Windows using IE. You can just checkout files through the browser. This feature does not work for Firefox.
One big problem we have is that the VPN breaks Sharepoint links so that the links that the people on the inside pass around break for those of us using VPN. That's not necessarily a Sharepoint issue, but it is annoying nonetheless as it does not have pretty URLs.
What about OneIS? It's hosted, which isn't for everyone, but it does mean one less thing to worry about. I've used it as an intranet, and it's easy to pick up: http://www.oneis.co.uk/
There are a lot of comments on this thread by now and I don't think that anyone who doesn't already know the answer to this question can read this page and get it. Words like collaboration and sharing don't seem to be adding up to anything. There are a lot of very different things that could be described in this way equally as accurately.
What's not right? Sharepoont is not one thing. It's a framework for building consistent versions of the business process things you currently ad-hoc with emails and documents named v.2-revised-Jen.
It's Microsoft's answer to your business problems like 'how can my team have internal blogs?' and 'we need document versioning' and 'we pass documents around by email to get approval and steps get missed' and 'how can we computerise these simple form based procedures?'
Fortunately at my workplace (a Microsoft/Exchange/Blackberry-Enterprise-Server -related software shop) we went the other direction. Sharepoint was so bad people got used to using e-mail and file shares instead. By the time I managed to get a TWiki in there it was kind of late, it's hard to break entrenched habits.
Sharepoint doesn't easily let you create free-form context and structure for content. TWiki takes a minimalist approach that's very easy to use.
It seems like there is growing interest in integrating products with it (non MS products) - might be a market growing for add ons, who knows. I only hear screams of pain.
MindTouch (http://www.mindtouch.com/) competes directly with SharePoint and the base system is open source. Aaron R. Fulkerson from the company creating it was interviewed in FLOSS weekly recently (http://twit.tv/floss89) Sounded pretty cool, and certainly worth a look if you have any doubts about introducing yet another lock-in to Microsoft platform.
You don't have to be a Linux person to get that feeling. I've been doing SharePoint development for exactly three years now (before that, classical .NET), and it keeps being 'rough' (not in a cool way) and sucky. Yes, every once in a while you still get a moments worth of development joy, before you run into another entirely MS-inflicted, never-seen-before bug, spend more hours re-administering IIS, web.config, SQL Server and SP itself, or mostly wait for ages on a 4 GB machine for Visual Studio's SharePoint extensions to compile your code into their CAB-based "solution packages". There's no reason why this should take forever but it does. Sure, I'm on a Mac and love Python, CouchDB etc. privately and for hobbyist stuff -- but sadly, the market that pays my bills rewards MS crap at the moment.
This is a market ripe for disruption though, because when developers and HNers realize something sucks, then corporate IT will eventually too, 5 years down the line. The question is where the disruption will come from. Some people bet on Wave, myself excluded.
why has no one just made a really easy alternative to this? sure there's things like huddle and google sites, but they're still way too difficult. I have shit to share with people in my company and i want to do it simply without tons of bloat or difficulty. In essence:
Too many? I don't like to sound like I'm "spamming" out my product, but I believe it's designed in such a simple manner than anything included that you aren't interested in using, sits quietly in the background.
Google docs is pretty much just like Sharepoint, except you don't need a massive install of Microsoft Office (read: bloat) to edit the documents. I don't see how Google docs is more difficult than Sharepoint, the interface is the same. You navigate around a list of documents, you click on one, and it spawns the editor for that document type.
Maybe it's because with Google Docs you don't get to use Word or Excel, and to anyone who's scared of anything that's not word or Excel that's hard.
Non-technical people don't seem to get to the step of generalising what they know about using computers, i.e. Word->word processor and Excel->spreadsheet, so going to something new like Google docs isn't like "oh this is an online word processor like Word" but instead go "this isn't Word OH MY GOD WHAT DO I DO?"
I've experienced that very limitation from people when it comes to online document editing and maintenance. However, my experience with how those kinds of people use Sharepoint is still compatible with Googledocs: create a document with Word or Excel, then upload it into shared storage where the document goes to die because they never edit or use the document again. Google docs supports this workflow, uploading a Microsoft Office document which gets converted. Now that I think about it, can you upload a document to replace the one that is currently there in GD? I'll have to test that. That would negate the I-can-only-learn-one-thing-and-that-one-thing-was-microsoft-office mentality.
True, but with Google Docs the uploading step is extra; you can open files and save them right inside the file open/save dialogs in Word and Excel if Sharepoint's setup properly.
If something could map say a "My Google Docs" folder under My Documents it would be the same; so you can just go into Word and open a file up for editing.
Personally I'd rather just open my browser, but hey I've used several word processors as well :P
I'd just use any Wiki that allows hierarchical divisions/namespaces (e.g. 'webs' in TWiki) and file attachments. Check out TWiki (http://twiki.org) or a comparison between wikis (google >wiki comparison matrix< and I think you'll find it).
Ironically the first time I was forced to use Sharepoint was when I was writing a book for O'Reilly. They used it as a rudimentary source control system for documents.
The best definition is that it's "an intranet in a box"
Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it, it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users.
Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned.
Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously.
Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a little bit before you can start customizing the portal.
Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer.
If you have further questions, ask away.