Earlier this week I visited a national membership association in wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark. The association had accepted a seemingly very nice offer from Microsoft: free licenses to MOSS 2007 to support a revamped public website.

Now with the implementation well underway, problems are beginning to surface. The systems integrator is having a hard time meeting some fairly basic requirements (e.g., scheduled publishing, modifying error messages, and more). They cite MOSS 2007 limitations and argue that meeting those requirements would require them to make significant changes to the core of MOSS 2007. To their credit, the integrator counsels against such modifications, citing potential upgrade problems in the future.

This may sounds unpleasant and familiar (not just to Microsoft customers), but it is a nice reminder that SharePoint 2007 really needs 3rd-party plug-ins for basic functionality. Still without an official roadmap, I would certainly also advise against changing too much in the core system. Moreover, as readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, system integrator knowledge of MOSS 2007 is very unevenly distributed. Even if you get the software for free, you need to plan and test carefully, as your mileage with the product may vary...