But when I actually figured it all out, it’s actually pretty sweet. Given the price of other workflow/BPM systems and document management systems, I’ll forgive Sharepoint its foibles.

Since you asked about Windows Workflow, it rocks. Again, a steep learning curve, but it is powerful and extensible. It’s not write once run anywhere, but if you can understand WF in one environment, a lot of that knowledge is transferable to other environments.

Tim

The first group is where there are some problems. I recently had to apply a custom template using CSS to what Microsoft term a blog site. The out of the box themes don’t follow web standards and use tables extensively (a compromise for backwards compatibility I guess). If you only want to theme a blog, you have to buy into designing a complete theme – or use your own MOSS/ASP.NET master page. Using your own master page is an issue since applying it to an existing page means you have to deal with all the existing placeholders. This is not too much of a deal for an ASP.NET developer, but your typical IT pro may struggle to do things quickly.

The blog and wiki site templates themselves need some additions and a Community Kit project is slowly working on improvements.

Renaming FrontPage to SharePoint Designer doesn’t remove the pain. I’ve experienced a fair number of crashes on 3 machines I use. It allows you to turn lists automatically into an XSLT web part that you can re-style. I often run into the case where the designer generates invalid XSLT (just try this on the built-in left hand menu webparts on a stock blog site). Not a problem for a seasoned dev or if you have fulltime staff in a large organisation, but for SME audience this is an issue.