Thanks ronjax2000 for the great feedback, glad you are pleased with your Lunarservice 

RandyT

I have a question along the lines of ronjax2000 statement. I am presently doing the sharepoint demo and would like to use some of the more editable templates that Microsoft has. Would I select the blank site template, and how do you upload the templates to the site, any help or ideas appreciated. John

Here is a link provided by jflattery on how to install and use premade Microsoft templates. I also know it is possible to use Front Page to create your own templates, but I have not tried it. If anyone finds "layouts" that I can added to the server for your Top Level site choice, send the link to the Sharepoint desk. As I will not be on the forums much. Thank you.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/wssapps/default.mspx

I'm new at administering SharePoint. A coworker and I went through the training recently and we spent all day today setting up a task list for a major team effort that's starting tomorrow. I came home and found that Lunarpages had set me up with a SharePoint site. It looks almost exactly the same as the one at work, and the differences aren't worth noting, since the functionality is there but slightly different in the menus. I suspect that Lunarpages has a different version of SharePoint from my server at work.

We tried to set up an "issues list," since that's what she had used before that worked well for her. We experienced major problems with it, so she deleted it and used a "task list" instead. I set up a task list here, and the choices and menus look exactly the same as they did at work. I learned a little something about list views, but ended up with some strange behavior from fields that I would have expected to see in the final list but didn't. I'm not worried, though. SharePoint isn't something you can dive right into and expect to have easy sailing afterward. It takes some experimentation and coming at the problem from several different directions before you can get a polished result that works for you.

I did find one strange situation that gave me a laugh, though. When I went to assign a task to a user, I expected to see only my username, since I'm the only member on my site. But instead, I saw me and another user named "Vegas Jay." So from now on, I'm assigning every imaginary task to Vegas Jay. He's going to be one busy dude.

Thanks very much to Lunarpages for setting up SharePoint for us. You guys are great.

Thanks for the welcome and the information. We're still using the 2003 version at work, and only for a very few limited purposes. It hasn't been rolled out to the entire company yet. The 2007 version is being looked at but as I understand it there's no formal implementation schedule. It is supposed to be a lot nicer than 2003, with many more features and not so much effort needed to customize it. I was hoping we would be implementing it here, but apparently that might take a while.

One difference I've noticed between this version and what we have at work is under the "Modify Shared Page" menu. This version opens a right-side menu. The first item is "Add Web Parts" with three choices shown beneath it - Browse, Search, and Import. On our version at work, "Add Web Parts" is a single menu item. When you mouse over it, another menu pops up to the left (like the Windows Start Menu) with Browse, Search, and Import shown on it. Also, on ours there is another choice on that menu entitled "Design This Page." Click that and it puts a check mark beside the menu item, and the page stays in design mode even if you close the menu, until you go back and uncheck that menu item. That's not a gigantic difference but I think it's interesting.

Something else I noticed was that clicking on Site Settings, Go to Site Administration, brings up a page where there's a menu item under Management and Statistics entitled "View site usage data." Clicking on that gives the following response:

On the system at work, you get an actual usage report. So it looks like some configuration is needed.

SharePoint is exactly what I need to set up a system for my customer - almost. I'm a volunteer with an organization that's looking for a kind of membership management site. The announcements and event list and links and tasks and discussions are great (although there are better discussion group setups available). What they wanted was for each member to have a personal page where he could keep his contact information and training records up to date. Then there would be an overall page where an administrator could look at everyone's information all at once. I know I can set up different "views" for a document, so the admin could look at one view that would show everyone's contact information, or another one that would show training courses completed, or maybe a third one that would show what details the member had worked in the past year. What I would like to do is have only the personal page viewable by a member, and not the overall contact list with everyone's home phone number, address, etc. Maybe with a little study and research I can figure out how to do that.

Since this is a beta test, I'm a little concerned that I could set up a complicated and customized SharePoint site and then find that Lunarpages decided not to implement SharePoint for everyone. So I'm a little leery to do much more than dabble with it for now.