I’ve been monitoring online jobs websites in the IT category since a year ago and there’s only 2 things I can observe happening again and again.
1. Anything that mentions Sharepoint in the job title or job requirements attracts a good pay. ASP.NET, WSS and MOSS are the wiz-words.
2. The only other area where the pay was as good is to be a senior java developer.
Microsoft SharePoint is as a collaborative tool. It means teams of people, groups of people, more than one, working together, whether they be on office documents or other types of material in a collaborative fashion. SharePoint is also seen as a portal-type application that allows you to bring disparate systems together into a one-stop shop type of environment. And as you might have guessed, Sharepoint runs on Microsoft .NET.
Now, just how good is Sharepoint? From installation, configuration and development to rollout and daily uses? As usual, the open source community has lots of bad things to say about Sharepoint and I can see why. I would like to hear from someone who have actually developed in Sharepoint or uses Sharepoint on a daily basis.
Judging by the amount of money some companies/corporates are currently advertising sharepoints positions for, I can only imagine more IT poeple fusing into Sharepoint regardless of how good or bad that product might be. The money aspect attracted some discussions where titles such as “Want a job? Learn Sharepoint” was more then enough to give you the idea. It’s said that there’s an overwhelming demand for SharePoint-savvy developers, especially in the federal government. Good examples of companies running on Sharepoint are Ferrari and PMI (Project Management Institute). It makes me think for a second maybe I should also watch a few training videos and see what it has to offer after all.
I was also wondering wouldn’t Google Docs be the best online solution if people just want to share documents and collaborate their changes? Of course, without seeing the bigger picture of what sharepoint can do, I hope someone more educated than I am can help me answer that question.
Josey says
I’m a SharePoint 2010 developer and I love it. In essence, SharePoint is just one massive ASP.NET web application. It fuses together languages like HTML, CSS, XML, XSL(T), and .NET to make a collaborative portal for Internet or Intranet sites that people can use to greatly increase efficiency in business and trim IT overhead with site maintenance. In essence, it combines application development with web development. That’s why it’s in such high demand. Aside form the dev and design side, you also have certifications dedicated strictly to configuring SharePoint as well as the Administrative duties that are needed; on both a site and server level.