Since Microsoft first released MOSS 2007, I can see an increased amount of manufacturing companies are investigating a potential move to SharePoint. Microsoft used brilliant freemium strategy and decided to give away a basic version of SharePoint (WSS – Windows SharePoint Services) bundled to Windows Server license. It created a significant flow of SharePoint viral evaluations in companies. Because of deployment and implementation ease, many companies started to implement WSS to improve the ability to share data and streamline collaboration. Sometimes, the solution growths can be really spontaneous.
I found the link published by Paul Andrew of Microsoft, very useful to evaluate your need and check upfront if your organizational demand and scale can fit SharePoint boundaries. The following two documents Estimate Performance and Capacity Requirements for Large Scale Document Repositories and SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits will take you to a long journey of planning an appropriate environment for your future SharePoint implementations.
During last few years, some PLM vendors and their partners made a bet on SharePoint as a platform to mainstream PLM deployment in organizations. User experience and IT compliance are two factors that made a significant influence on vendors, partners and companies. Such products as Windchill ProductPoint or TeamCenter Community are completely relying on Office and SharePoint platform as an infrastructure.
What is my conclusion? Microsoft SharePoint is a large a complicated platform. Sometimes, I can see people having some illusions with regards how easy they can deploy SharePoint based solution for their product development needs. To check detailed SharePoint pre-requisites and make sizing of your drawings and other product-related information is obvious, but important. Just my thoughts..
Best, Oleg
