SharePoint Adventures

My present company is a Microsoft shop and, although we have a very small Notes setup, we decided to use SharePoint as a collaboration tool. So far we have WSS 3.0 up on VMWare, and plan to go to the full MOSS as soon as we have the data center question resolved (more on that in another post). Obviously each product has its weaknesses and strengths, and it has been very interesting comparing the way things are done in SharePoint with the way things are done in Notes. Here are a few little things that I have found in SharePoint that I really like.

• If you create a field on a SharePoint form and use a reserved name for that field, SharePoint warns you and will not let you create the field. Compare that to adding a folder in your Notes mail file called "People", which is the name of an existing view. You don't get what you expect (I can't remember exactly what goes wrong because it has been such I long time since I fell into that particular hole), but it would be nice if Notes warned you.
• We have a large project at work, and set up a SharePoint site to manage it. One element of the project is a task list. What I really liked was the ability to view this information in a Gantt chart, Notes has a calendar view - how difficult would it be to create a Gantt chart view?  This is something I have been whishing existed as a standard notes view for over 10 years! When I attended Lotusphere in January 2007 I saw an example of creating a pie chart from a view, which gave me some hope, but so far nothing has materialized from Lotus (but bear in mind that something may have some up that I didn't see.)

So far the basic SharePoint has been pretty easy to use, and it is starting to do some useful things for my company. I am looking forward to seeing what we can do with it over the next year or two.