What is the best way to get started with Sharepoint?

[Pack10]

We are going to begin looking into Sharepoint. We are primarily Access and Excel developers and I also have done some
form work with Infopath. We are on Office 2007. As a development tool, can we use Sharepoint 2010 with Office 2007.
What is Sharepoint Designer? Thanks for the info.

 

[w33mhz]

Start with joomla instead!
HAHA j/k
I would say you should start with looking at Sharepoint Foundation first and see if you like it and find out what functionalities its lacking. I believe this comes with windows server 2008 R2 and I don't think you need to purchase additional licensing for it (I could be wrong on that). I wish that we would have done that before jumping into full sharepoint because we really don't utilize all the features and we pay alot for it. I think the short comings we could have worked around without buying all the licensing.
Office 2007 can work with Sharepoint 2010 as far as the standpoint of just opening and editing files from document libraries, but I think you will find some issues if you want to try and use the MOSS parts of sharepoint because of version compatibliities, this is from a pratical standpoint not a technical one.
Sharepoint Designer is a tool used to manage and develop different aspects of Sharepoint 2010, there are situations where Sharepoint Designer is the ONLY way to manage things, but sometimes the only way to manage other things is done via the browser. It is a pretty good tool, can be a little clunky to navigate around at first, but once you watch a couple how-to's its not bad.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint/ee263910

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint/fp123618

Windows Haiku:

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

 

[Pack10]

Thanks very much for the info.
It will be quite helpful.