Well, I guess I won't be downloading SharePoint Designer just yet, then ... even the best-run and largest organizations have problems.You know, I really wish the free software/open source world would come up with something as easy and effective as SharePoint. Maybe it will soon. SharePoint has become as popular as it is (and it's making Microsoft over $1 billion a year now) because, like Office, it's broad enough to meet the majority of most people's needs.
It's complex, but not really complicated, and I know it's not beyond the skills of the free software/open source community. Support, of course, would be something else. Now that would be a company I'd like to start ...
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I'm currently working on something rather similar, quite so in fact. Where we plan on opening the core open source, allowing anyone to develop modules on top of it. It's 12 months of development in, and has unique/new angles on the CRM/Business Management world.
Did I mention, we're also developing it in python?
we did away with sharepoint due to a number of major problems. What did we move to?
Plone
It does not have all the fancy proprietary plugins (which all require IE) but that is a good thing as the data is much more portable.
What features of sharepoint do you require which are not provided by a CMS solution with collaboration?
Microsoft a well run company? But anyway, I digress...
Once again this is one of the things that Open Source has the components and even the expertise to to do - but it just takes somebody to take the lead in putting all the pieces together. A prime example of "just putting the pieces together" is the FreeIPA project - using all open source components (with Fedora Directory at the heart) they have created something that is comparable to a Microsoft Active Directory in terms of integration, features and ease of setup. When IPA-v2 is finished (within a year) it will play amongst the big boys :)
Alfresco, an open source ECM, can be used as a sharepoint server:
http://www.alfresco.com/media/releases/2008/07/labs-3/
An alternative to SharePoint:
http://www.alfresco.com
See this page for more detail:
http://www.alfresco.com/about/events/ondemand/
Give Plone a go. Better than sharepoint for web content management, though not there yet for document management (Plone 4.0 coming at the end of this year will have BLOB support for efficient document handling).
Sharepoint is easy and effective? Check out cmswatch's statements about it.
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