what is all this buzz around SharePoint [closed]

Question

I am an ASP.NET developer. I have many friends working with sharepoint. What I don't really understand is why do companies requre always a customized solution? Who are the usual clients for a sharepoint website and some examples of the requirements that they need

Answer 1

SharePoint is a platform which one can do many great things, it fulfills close to 80% of the business needs (shared calendars, document libraries, approvals, versioning, etc) out of the box and 20% being fulfilled by customization, whether using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer.

Answer 2

Because, put simply, SharePoint is a platform, and you can't get far without customising it.

Answer 3

Sharepoint at it's core is about Content Management. Storage, management and retrieval of documents over the intranet/extranet/internet/whatever.

But that statement alone is a gross understatement of it's true capabilities. People going into SharePoint typically have needs revolving around document management, but also:

1) Collaboration (revolving around the documents and elsewise)
2) Business intelligence (reporting on facts often found in these documents)
3) Project Management
etc, etc...

It's helpful to go to the Microsoft website, read a lot of their material and even build a demo machine yourself...