I've been fortunate enough to have some time to do a little more detailed evaluation of Microsoft's SharePoint recently and I've been pleasantly surprised how much it's come on since the last version I looked at in detail. I don't get the time to do any 'proper' programming these days but I like to keep my hand in with various technologies just so I understand what developers are saying to me in progress meetings.

I guess I had taken my eye off the ball for a couple of years and only in the last few weeks have I been able to play with the functionality in SharePoint 2007, just in time to understand the new features appearing in the 2010 version.  On the whole the experience has been very satisfying but I find it surprising that for many key features it's still necessary to bolt on third party enhancements.  I should say at this point that I've been specifically looking at the document management features and I may be sub-conciously comparing it to dedicated products in that market but even so the lack of an inline file viewer amongst other things stills seems very odd.  

Thankfully there are some great third party options - the AjaxDocumentViewer from Adeptol is a very nice little piece of kit to solve your file viewing options (over 200 file types they claim) and when requiring direct integration with scanners (either local or networked) the rather entertainingly named Dark Blue Duck appears to save the day.

For anyone looking for an entry level solution for scanner integration the bundled Scan to SharePoint software that comes with some of the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners is a nice cost effective solution but it lacks a file viewer whilst indexing. This means it's all too easy to attach the wrong image if you have a batch to complete. However, as it's bundled for free it's hard to complain too much.

Finally, an indespensible little tool for anyone migrating existing documents and files to SharePoint is DocKit.  I found DocKit to be intuitive to use and performed all the tasks I asked of it with the minimum of fuss.  Allowing you to import entire folder structures of files and add meta-data from a variety of formats, either during the import or later, this tool is likely to be an integral part of some upcoming client data migration projects.

I'm guessing we'll come across some more missing features as we develop the detailed requirements in the coming weeks but if I continue to find great third-party solutions there seems little to hold back SharePoint's progress.