i'm concerned, though, with licensing fees from microsoft. while sharepoint is obviously the superior collaborative software for businesses, its serious web 2.0 deficiencies and marraige to the microsoft office suite put its long term success into an expensive question: in the long term, is it worth sticking with sharepoint or would it save a business money to jump the microsoft ship now and invest in more rapidly-developing open-source technology?

sure, a jump would incur a temporal loss in productivity; integrating non-microsoft technology and working with a 2.0 learning gap are serious issues. but the long-term money saved by eliminating licensing fees for each employee's office suite and immensely better social media integration (a gold-mine for business if planned and managed properly) could be much more worth it.

thoughts?

I just hope I won'tt do too much SharePoint in the future…

So I'm also with the it depends but tending toward the no.

I am currently on my 7th SharePoint project (an internet facing portal with extranet and intranet)
check it out

https://www.wsaa.asn.au/
note you can't see the members but this is essentially MySpace, Facebook for the Australian urban water industry.

Credit goes here to OBS whom have done the intial work (look and feel(nav), FBA and Topology)

Agree it is excellent ROI if it fits your requirements and customisation is reasonable, heavy customisation as with SAP, Siebel etc is expensive possibly at some point more expensive than building a custom solution.

If you can mix some cusomisation and config with OOB say 80/20 rule and meet your requirement you will kick a goal. SharePoint can allow you to develop what might be a custom .NET app that would take you 3 months in 6 weeks. If it can look enough like what SP will give you out of the Box particularly looks and navigation. A lot of projects start rewriting the nav and putting their own in, state management, web part infrastructure if this is happening it is possibly a sign that SP is/was the wrong technology from the outset. Work smarter not harder plan, design, architect, pilot.

The other catch is deployment and upgrading, I have a preference for custom site defintions and solution packages, if you choose the other option it can become incredibly painful to get your SP project from one environment to the next which is important in large environment(s) (organisations) and upgrading it can become very very nasty.

To get benefit out of SP in terms of its deployment infrastructure you need to be in it for the long term and you need to need what it offers again it is great for very large environments(s) (organsiations) (lots of web servers to deploy across and manage). If you have a need to upgrade or move your app b/w environments you will need a solution package with a custom site definition by the time you add the avg 3-4 weeks amount of time you need for this you need to look carefully at weather if you are not in it for the long hall SP is a good idea. If you can do it in farm you will be ahead, but can this be sustained, more than likely you are creating a mess for me to fix thank you $$$ . You consulting firms know who you are.

There is a huge learning curve with SP for .NET people if they are more .NET than SP they will likely commit a number of costly errors, this can turn what should be a 500k project into a $1 million project. No offence to these folks but I went through that learning curve myself and even though I argued against certain things they happened any way on some projects. Of course if the ratio of SP experienced peopke to .NET is disproportionate it is a tough ask.