Screwy
Everyone was too tired (and full of mango-chicken curry and frozen key lime pie) to game last night. We only had half the group together anyway, so we called it an early "game" night and then Evan and I consulted about what to do about my Microsoft Sharepoint dreams. Working with as many remote employees and freelancers for art, writing, and editing, I've been bashing my head against a wall trying to figure out a way to make Microsoft Sharepoint work for us.
Sharepoint. I want it. I can get it... just not in a form that would be useful for us. I've had numerous offers pass before my eyes. My own personal hosting service, where I host Nikchick.com, sent me an offer to set me up with Sharepoint! Everyone and their brother has some sort of Sharepoint server offer... and they all COMPLETELY SUCK. If I want to use this for the numerous projects Green Ronin has going at any one time, to track and share art files, InDesign files, PDFs, manuscripts and what have you, 500MB of storage is not going to cut it. Even 1GB, 2BG, or 3GB is not going to do it. I can get hosting with massive space, Terabytes of space, but NOT that I can run Sharepoint on... Fore the kind of space I want, I'm expected to pay $1500-$3000 PER MONTH. Holy crap.
Sharepoint seems like a really nifty tool. It's like Basecamp on steroids (Basecamp is a pretty fine little tool but it lacks or makes difficult too many of the features that Sharepoint teases me with; we've been using Basecamp for almost a year but even on the paid program with that are limited in the number of active projects and GBs of space we have access to) and Community Server has been bandied about as a possible alternative but I'm not sure. I've already dragged the guys across both dotProject and Basecamp before now and I don't want to make a jump to anything less than the functional sexiness of Sharepoint. (There are few products from Microsoft that I'm even a tepid fan of but the combined e-mail/calendar/task list of Outlook and now Sharepoint are two products that I've looked to others to provide and come crawling back to MS for.)
I even looked into having our own server housed here at GRHQ but in order to do it right and make sure we had proper back-ups and firewalls and other such things (not to mention my inevitable anti-technology aura) makes it just as expensive and not nearly as secure as a remote hosting option with actual professionals.
I've been banging my head on the wall of this problem for weeks now, since before GenCon. I resign myself that it's not going to happen and then a new hope springs up and leads me along for a while. Today was another one of those distracting, frustrating days. It's screwy that an application that is supposedly scalable to small businesses like mine, that is priced reasonably affordably for what it offers, is still outrageously out of price range once we find hosting for it!
Sharepoint. I want it. I can get it... just not in a form that would be useful for us. I've had numerous offers pass before my eyes. My own personal hosting service, where I host Nikchick.com, sent me an offer to set me up with Sharepoint! Everyone and their brother has some sort of Sharepoint server offer... and they all COMPLETELY SUCK. If I want to use this for the numerous projects Green Ronin has going at any one time, to track and share art files, InDesign files, PDFs, manuscripts and what have you, 500MB of storage is not going to cut it. Even 1GB, 2BG, or 3GB is not going to do it. I can get hosting with massive space, Terabytes of space, but NOT that I can run Sharepoint on... Fore the kind of space I want, I'm expected to pay $1500-$3000 PER MONTH. Holy crap.
Sharepoint seems like a really nifty tool. It's like Basecamp on steroids (Basecamp is a pretty fine little tool but it lacks or makes difficult too many of the features that Sharepoint teases me with; we've been using Basecamp for almost a year but even on the paid program with that are limited in the number of active projects and GBs of space we have access to) and Community Server has been bandied about as a possible alternative but I'm not sure. I've already dragged the guys across both dotProject and Basecamp before now and I don't want to make a jump to anything less than the functional sexiness of Sharepoint. (There are few products from Microsoft that I'm even a tepid fan of but the combined e-mail/calendar/task list of Outlook and now Sharepoint are two products that I've looked to others to provide and come crawling back to MS for.)
I even looked into having our own server housed here at GRHQ but in order to do it right and make sure we had proper back-ups and firewalls and other such things (not to mention my inevitable anti-technology aura) makes it just as expensive and not nearly as secure as a remote hosting option with actual professionals.
I've been banging my head on the wall of this problem for weeks now, since before GenCon. I resign myself that it's not going to happen and then a new hope springs up and leads me along for a while. Today was another one of those distracting, frustrating days. It's screwy that an application that is supposedly scalable to small businesses like mine, that is priced reasonably affordably for what it offers, is still outrageously out of price range once we find hosting for it!
Why don't you try Wrike? My team loves it. So do I. It has nice features like Gantt charts. The coolest thing is it allows you to create and update tasks via email.It's very easy and totally addictive.