Re: Anyone use Community Server for an Intranet? Compared toSharepoint? Or other 'portals'?

I was asked this off-list, but figured I might as well come clean on the
list. 

> What are the reasons for not using Sharepoint? 

Damn. I was afraid someone was going to ask that. ;o)

Alright, here are my reasons. If anyone wants to comment/counter these,
please do.

>From a training course I've taken on Sharepoint and what research I've
done, things that make me question sharepoint are:

 - inflexible end-user interface
    - heavily dependant on iFrames
    - limited customizability of built-in web controls
        - we'd have to build our own controls 
 - oddly arcane admin interface
 - seems tied into FrontPage
 - seems to work great *if* everyone in the organization
   properly uses MS Office and Teamsites
    - would involve a lot of training
        - people still wouldn't want to deal with it and
          would revert to old habits

Sharepoint seems like a great idea, but implemented rather haphazzardly.
It also looks like it would work perfectly *if* you accept the product
as-is and not want to modify it too much and *if* your staff accepts the
new system and maintains most of their content via the MS Office <->
Team site integration.

For the most part, it seems overkill for what people want/need in our
organization, and rather inflexible as a tool.

In fact, it's pretty much the same thing we discovered when shopping for
a CMS for our public site. Lots of CMSes had lots of great features,
but, in the end, we only needed a hanful of them, plus a bunch of custom
options that we were going to have to build ourselves anyways.

Ultimately, we're thinking the solution would be to get folks using
teamsites that are willing to actually use them to maintain their own
documents within their department, then use another tool to selectively
publish the documents they want to share system wide. 

We've also built our own custom CMS for our public facing sites that
we're considering moving over to the intranet, but we want to explore
some other options first.

-Darrel