Introduction
Almost every business today needs to communicate information, not only to their customers, but to their employees as well. Employees also need to be able to collaborate on documents, schedule meetings, and have discussions with other employees. An Intranet site is an ideal place to accomplish each of these. In the past, creating an Intranet meant a lot of programming time, a lot of changes, and a lot of money. Now, you can use Microsoft SharePoint to create an Intranet with all of these features right out of the box.

What is SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint is a pretty cool product. It is written in Microsoft .NET, and supplies a lot of neat features right out of the box. Most people have different definitions of what SharePoint really is. Here is our take on what Microsoft SharePoint is and what it can do for you.

SharePoint is a portal web site with the ability for users to create their own links pointing to other sites within their Intranet or on the Internet.
SharePoint is an end-user tool that allows people to create their own web sites quickly and easily. In addition, they do not need to get any help from the IT department.
SharePoint is also a development platform that allows developers to work with an existing infrastructure and just add on their own functionality. Instead of developers having to create a whole web application from scratch, they can leverage what is already available in SharePoint.
SharePoint is also a "file system on steroids". This means that it is able to store documents and allow for easy retrieval, indexing, searching, check-in and check-out capabilities, and version history of your documents.

Uses of SharePoint
There are many projects that people have used SharePoint for. Below is a list of some of the sites we have seen developed and/or helped our clients develop.
Client Tracking
Contact Tracking
Project Tracking
Organize documents by Client/Contact/Project
Keep track of versions of your documents
Control who can add/edit/delete/view documents
Schedule meetings for projects through Outlook 2003 and/or SharePoint
Issue Tracking
Keep track of product issues, FAQ
Create Intranet Site for Departments
Share news and events with users
Birthdays, Pictures, Baby Announcements
Create Discussion Board
Repository for simple forms using InfoPath
Users can create data entry forms
Store data into SharePoint

Summary
SharePoint is an ideal product for creating an Intranet site to help you and your teams become more productive. With it's integration with Microsoft Office 2003, sharing documents, keeping track of versions of documents, tracking customers and contacts, scheduling meetings and having discussions with your team is very easy. Create your Intranet today using Microsoft SharePoint.