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COMPUTER CENTRAL: Check out Microsoft’s Sharepoint

LAS VEGAS — Clearly the biggest thing at this year’s giant WinConnections show here is Microsoft Sharepoint. The venues about it were crowded, the how-to presentations were standing room only and the buzz was palpable in the million square feet of convention space at the Mandalay Bay.

Sharepoint, as a way of introduction, is Microsoft’s document collaboration suite aimed at businesses of all sizes, including large enterprises who need a document retention and management system. It has humble beginnings as part of Microsoft Front Page but really burst into its own recently as businesses realized that handling electronic documents had become a bit of a nightmare as filing cabinets filled with paper were replaced with hard drives full of DOC files.

Many companies have document retention policies that are cumbersome to control. It does little good to have a policy that documents expire and are deleted after five years if no one goes in and does the deletion. Sharepoint can take care of all of that for you. It is basically a giant file library with rooms and rules and workflows.

Some companies, like Hawaiian Air, are using Sharepoint as their Web site. When used with Office 2007 there is strong integration and syncing with Outlook and the rest of the Office suite; documents can be saved to a Sharepoint library or repository just as easily as the local drive. Implementing it, at least in the basic form, is a snap for businesses with an IT person or two; for those without or those who don’t want a hassle, a bustling Sharepoint hosting business has sprung up on the heels of hosting of Microsoft Exchange and terminal-server based applications.

That means businesses without IT help (or overworked IT help) can simply have their Sharepoint instance professionally hosted and managed, saving them a bunch of grief and money in startup costs. A basic version of Sharepoint is included with Microsoft’s main server product but most companies who own the server software don’t know they already have Sharepoint. The free version is called Windows Sharepoint Services, or WSS. Larger companies will want Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, or MOSS, which offers many more features and is designed for larger companies and enterprises. During the WinConnections show, which also had components for Sharepoint, Exchange, Windows Mobile and application development, I lost track of the vendors showing add-ons to Sharepoint or offering technical assistance. Some were offering to build portal sites, at which Sharepoint excels, and others were offering add-on modules for document management and retention.

The beauty of the product is the simplicity; someone with no programming skill at all can have a fully functional site with basic functionality up and running in a day. And that is the best building block for something like Sharepoint ... if you have the need to store documents, give it a look. You may already own it.

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: You can see what the fuss is about and examples at www.sharepoint.com

James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer services firm and tech columnist for Scripps Howard News
Service. His e-mail address is jim(at)cyberdads.com