I have been hearing about sharepoint right from its first release and ignored it for quite a while now. It was a content management system and I had nothing to do with it. Besides there were so many buzz words that kept confusing me.

But finally now I am attending the training for the same. First day told me that sharepoint 2010 foundation is for free. That lifted my spirits a bit. That means I can try out and play around for quite a while without commiting to the product.

Second impressive part of Sharepoint is it has integrated all the latest technologies from .net seamlessly. Looks like they eat there own dog food. Every feature made available from Sharepoint site can be programmed through visual studio and through the designer. Second point is business logic can not be added through either the site management and also through the sharepoint designer. So that means there is still good scope for developers 🙂

Third most important thing you would need to understand that sites must be visualized clearly before development. There is a lot of stuff that the end user can do. So a purchase department personnel can very well visualize the workflow of his daily task and create it in the site. Additionally he can use his existing knowledge of word and excel and use the same forms to enter the information. So there is no learning curve for him because he is going to use a new technology. This seems to be most important. This will facilitate the acceptance for use of sharepoint to a great extent.

Office is integrated in sharepoint. For development purposes Office 2010 is required but excel and word files can be created where office is not installed using the sharepoint portal.

Workflow feature is inbuilt and visio can create the state machines and then using the SPD (share point designer) user can declaratively associate the actions with state.

In all looks like a very big learning curve for a developer. Usage aspect becomes much more important for development of a sharepoint site.