Why is Sharepoint so perfect for my company?  Let's get a history lesson and learn why Sharepoint was designed for groups like us, why Sharepoint rocks so hard.

My company is actually two companies, one half works in the US (mostly but not entirely Atlanta) and the other half works in the UK (mostly but not entirely NOT in America).  We work on the same product, usually different versions of the same product but still the same product.  Over there, they do all the new features work.  Over here, we get the customer requirements from the customers who have kept us out of bankruptcy for the last three years.  We should be talking.

We've tried Outlook's public folders as a means to keep everyone informed.  Sucks - too many folders, poorly organized, no way to see what is really in there.

We've tried a home grown bug tracker tool as a way to track new features and fixes to the product.  That's ok, as long as you know what you are looking for and happen to think to look there first.

We've even recently launched an internal blog.  That's pretty cool, but not a team tool - only the owner (CIO) can create new posts.  The rest of us have to just comment on his ideas.  No ideas of our own.

VSS - store documents and code, but again, if you don't know what to look for (and where, we have 30 archives) you're screwed.

AIM is pretty much a company standard, cuts phone bills.  But those conversations only involve two people

E-mail chains - to quick to explode into a million disjointed comments and get dropped.  And again, if you aren't in the e-mail group, you don't know what's going on.

What we need are discussion groups, like news groups but easily threaded.  It needs to allow anyone to create a new discussion or comment on an old one.  People who care about a topic need to know when new stuff is added to the discussion.  It should allow documents to be stored in the same area as the discussion.  Splinter off side discussion groups when a topic is big and heavy.  What we need is Sharepoint.  All the benefit of a community portal - events, announcements, calendar, discussions, links, etc. and more.  You can store documents like VSS.  You can actually integrate a document with the workspace discussion group so that when you open a doc, you also open via the Office 2003 task panel the discussions about that topic so the reviews can be completely caught up.  Sharepoint!!!

Brendon and I have been pumping this for months.  I gave the decision makers a book on the topic.  We held meetings.  We've sent out countless e-mails.  Everyone kept telling us, it sounds good but...  but what?  Free product here!  They're worried about the cost of setting it up and managing it.  I kicked off the install and went to the bathroom.  When I came back it was ready to go.  Where is the setup cost?  Manage it?  It should grow and go wild.  This is a communication tool - don't manage communication, encourage it.

Anyway, I'm giving a live demo of this next Friday and I expect to have people buy-in by then because of the simple fact that it will already be done and ready for them.  No problems.  Otherwise I'll slit my wrists on the conference room table out of sheer frustration!

-- Matt Ranlett