I agree with several of the posters that have indicated a general lack of business interest in making a full commitment to the full use of SP. It may be that the “idea” men feel threatened by sharing their arena, but I think it’s more fear of change. As DB pros, we look at it from our mindset, you know, “whoopeee, woo-hoo, we have new toys!”. We like to play with new tools and find the best and most efficient ways to do things. I think this makes us a little unique in the world of carpeted cages. Most folks get set into their processes and get comfortable with their routines, and change becomes difficult.

I’ve designed some pretty cool SharePoint implementations, and the most difficult thing by far has been getting the buy-in from management and operations. Sadly, I’ve rarely seen it used for more than a interface to manage the same nasty messy underlying file system they are trying to replace.

Getting anyone to the point of actually using the collaborative features, even to the simplistic end of keeping 6000 copies of the same-ish document off of the exchange server, has been nothing short of – ummm- impossible. Nobody wants to take a few weeks now to save time in the future. Why do today what you can put off til tomorrow, right? You’d think seeing the beauty of easily finding content using metadata and custom views would be a snap to sell. Nah, rather poke around folders for days. Manage document approval with a three-state workflow? Bah. Print it and run around the office.

Sheesh. Now I’m getting all het-up thinking about it. Off to hunt down some beer popsicles…