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I wanted to know how many people have gone the route of nearly or completing replacing your standard file server which we have all come to become so comfortable with by using Sharepoint. What kinda of limitations prevent you from fully replacing file servers?

I have file servers that I inherited with little documentation on the complex file permissions. People are using Sharepoint Server (moss 2007) for a little bit of work but its still not widely used yet. I was wondering if this would be a good time to upgrade to 2010 (not sure which version yet) in an attempt to largely reduce my usage of file servers. I feel like I could get away with Foundation but I'd need to make sure what features of MOSS are being used before determining if features would be missed.

PHLiGHT
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The simple reason why we haven't replace traditional file storage with Sharepoint is that deploying a file server requires a basic server with no licenses (if you run a Windows server for storage then yes, you have to pay for licenses, but it's still fairly cheap) and just load it up with hard drives and put a layer of RAID over the top.

With Sharepoint, you need much more expensive servers, you need to fork out for sharepoint licenses and you then have to maintain a sharepoint installation rather than a simple file server.

So for us, it's simply budgetary reasons. Simple file sharing = cheap, sharepoint = expensive.

Mark Henderson
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    +1 One thing that is way too frequently overlooked is the need for a SQL dba with large(r) size Sharepoint installs. For Sharepoint to really shine SQL has to be transparent to the overall implementation and that's not going to be the case with huge repositories that require advanced database tuning without a knowledgeable dba. – squillman Sep 19 '10 at 00:03
  • Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the need for SQL licenses... – Mark Henderson Sep 19 '10 at 00:08
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This is an Office product meant for Office Document collaboration. Yeah you can store other document types but I remember in documentation that SharePoint isn't supposed to replace your File Servers... but I believe it had to do with a upload size limitation.

tjinak
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You can't put EXE files on a Sharepoint site; there's probably other restricted executable content as well.

mfinni
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