Advantages over a plain-jane shared drive?

[kimm00]

My company has network drives where we keep our shared files. They can be accessed from any remote location after logging into the intranet. My question is, are there any advantages to using Sharepoint vs. a plain shared drive? Microsoft's FAQ sheet provided the answer below, which doesn't apply to my organization (since our server is already in place).

Q. What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?

A. No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
No software to download - ready to start from the word go
No IT resources - Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
Faster deployment

Pay as you go, pay as you grow!

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

When you say hosted SharePoint do you mean you will not run it yourself?

I would say that an advantage that you get with the SharePoint Portal Server is that you can utilize the search and index possibilites that you have with SharePoint Portal server. You can index contents like, shares on fileservers, webpages etc. However that functionality is VERY limited if you would use the Windows SharePoint Services that comes with Windows Server 2003.

I am using the Portal Server and I have setup indexes to a lot of different fileservers in our organisation world wide, which will allow users to more easily find documents that are related to a certain topic or project from on single place. Ofcourse we are storing a lot of documents and information within SharePoint but far fram everything, so being able to setup searches and indexes towards servers and shares outside of sharepoint is a great advantage.

Regards,
Thomas