The company I work for have implemented a Sharepoint server as an intranet recently. On the whole, I consider it an excellent piece of software and a formidable solution in flexibility and capability.
BUT there is one enormous flaw with it: Calendar sharing.
This is quoted from the Microsoft Powerpoint document for Sharepoint integration:
“Note  When you connect resources to Outlook 2007, the resources appear in their respective sections of the Outlook 2007 navigation pane. Calendars appear in the Calendar pane, under Other Calendars; Tasks appear in the Tasks pane, under Other Tasks; Contact Lists appear in the Contacts pane, under Other Contacts. Discussion Lists are similar to Document Libraries and appear in the Mail pane, under SharePoint Lists.”

At present, if a company with a Microsoft  Exchange email/calendar  system has a company-wide calendar, which is to contain the movements of its employees, it is a public Exchange calendar.
When you add an item to it, you simply invite yourself, and any other colleagues who might/will be attending, and it not only sends you all a notification email, upon user acceptance it also imports the date and event into your personal outlook calendar, a separate beast which can also contain private meetings and events and even your own family birthdays  or whatever.

This personal calendar is what ALL mobile phones, and non-windows PDAs synchronise with.
It’s the perfect system, you get both private and public events (pertaining to you) in one calendar, all mixed together, all synchronised to pretty much any phone or PDA in existence. It is faultless, and functional.

With a Sharepoint based calendar, you get two options.
1) With Outlook 2003, you get an extra calendar, which doesn’t sync with your personal calendar. It cannot be changed or modified from within outlook, it must be modified from sharepoint.

2) With Outlook 2007, you get an extra calendar, which doesn’t sync with your personal calendar. You can change it from within outlook, but you can’t sync this calendar with your personal calendar.
Either way – it breaks the phone/PDA synchronization, at least for non-microsoft OS’s and software.  They all sync your phone to the outlook personal calendar/tasks/contacts. They wont look at sharepoint equivalents. By “they” I mean Nokia products specifically. You know that small phone manufacturer you might not have heard of…?

There is one way which it might work: Windows Mobile 2003 allows you to select which calendar to sync with and may also allow more than one calendar . I haven’t checked because I used to have a windows mobile phone and swore never to use the horrendously slow and over-specced OS ever again. But I digress….

Maybe you can sync BOTH calendars to the device, but you’re still left with 2 calendars! In theory.….

How has this step backward not been noticed? This enormous zit on the face of functionality offered by sharepoint? Did no one care? Did none of the many thousands of developers employed by the software giant stop and think ”….wait, no one will be able to sync this to their personal devices”?

Or is it a marketing ploy?  Are they waiting until businesses adopt Sharepoint, then they will update outlook and windows mobile to provide the functionality TOGETHER, requiring a trifecta of Microsoft software in order to provide the same functionality already offered by public calendars in outlook/exchange 2003 with any sync device…?

Somebody please tell me they have fixed it.  Please…..