So I am making the Sharepoint intranet Live this weekend and it has all gone rather swimmingly (which is why I haven’t had a lot to say here I am afraid.

The one thing I will not is I was not sufficiently skilled to design my own .aspx page for a template which could do what I needed for bookings.

Thus I used the fantastic MRBS to provide what I needed, it links to AD via LDAP, it lets me book using periods rather than time and it is simple to use. The initial implementation can be tricky as the config.inc.php file you download off their site seems to be missing some instructions on what commands do what. if you have any issues with it please let me know (Edugeek was a big help with this).

I will note I had problems using it with the latest version of PHP so you may have to go back to php 5.2.x

Sharepoint comes with 40 templates which really are fantastic, I am finding a lot of use for the helpdesk one which allows me to track everything very neatly (although admittedly is not as nice as the dedicated software I have used in the past)

I was planning on creating my own CSS for the intranet but overall I have found the default one very good for it’s use and it probably will not be a good use of my time.

Overall for places where spending money on dedicated services is not an option WSS will really does things nicely and does not require a hell of a lot of prior knowledge to get the basic services off the ground. I have learned quite a bit about ISS as I have gone along as it was what caused most of the issues I actually had.