Welcome to SharePoint, watch your steps!

I have recently downloaded and built a sharepoint site for a school. I have all the basic functions but don’t appear to have everything. i.e connecting to outlook, web parts are not all there. When i go to site features I only have ‘Team Collaboration lists’.

Is this due to our server licence?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Stuart

DotNetPro is being a little harsh. Yes Tom, your post had lots of inaccuracies, but I don’t blame you as much as I blame the “steep learning curve.” Your post represents everyone’s “first/second/third/hundredth SharePoint project” vibe very well.

As to simplicity, yes, there are worse Enterprise products (most of them)–but what about, you know, non-Enterprise products? At what point do you say “ah, forget it, I’m going back to static HTML pages.” Or more realistic–”ah, forget it, I’m going back to straight build-it-from-the-ground-up coding.” Maybe it’s just me.

If I could use the appendectomy metaphor, what Tom was trying to accomplish required a band-aid–an adhesive bandage, applied to the skin. What SharePoint required of him was to perform an appendectomy. DotNetPro, you’ve asserted that other Enterprise products are worse (which is true). But Tom just needed to apply a band-aid. Should it have been so hard?

SharePoint Customization is very simple and powerful – you can do absolutely anything when it comes to customizing SharePoint. The learning curve is steep, but I challenge anyone to demonstrate how customizing any other portal software that does Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, and the myriad of other things SharePoint does is any simpler or more flexible than SharePoint.

Thanks for your comment. Going behind the scenes in SharePoint is much less intuitive than going behind the scenes in other systems. I’m merely listing 10 concepts that were unfamiliar to me.

Re the appendectomy comment, you’re basically saying that people who want to customize their SharePoint site have to go to formal schooling? Seems a little extreme. You have to do the equivalent of going to medical school just to, for example, get rid of the Quick Launch bar and replace it with your own content?

This blog is no less ridiculous that someone blogging about the horrors of trying to perform an appendectomy with no formal schooling.

Also I recommend you search on “SharePoint governance”–a busy topic–as it solves the problem of “SharePoint chaos”. Well, maybe not solves the problem, but at least IDENTIFIES it, if nothing else.