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Posted on 21 Sep 2005 at 16:10

Jon Honeyball gives you a taster of Microsoft's new operating system

Well, according to the email I've just received, Microsoft has released a set of 30 such demonstration sites for you to download, plug in and explore. You can find them at www.microsoft.com

These scenarios have titles such as Case Work Management, Competitive Intelligence, Employee Training, Event Coordination, Expense Reimbursement, Meeting Management, New Product Development, Professional Services Contracts and so forth. There's something in here for everyone, and I think you should download them and plug them into your SharePoint server; and if you haven't got SharePoint installed yet, then go do that too, because it's a free component of the Windows 2003 Server platform. Okay, there's also a full SharePoint Portal Server product, which is a significant upgrade, both in terms of features and pricing, but the free SharePoint Server will be more than good enough to get your creative juices flowing.

If you don't have a spare server box, or you can't cope with the thought of doing the simple installation yourself, then go to www.microsoft.com and try a SharePoint Server for free for a month, courtesy of a Microsoft partner called Apptix. This gets you a server for 30 days, with five user accounts and 10MB of disk space. I've set up an account and made sure there's no credit card information required - so there's no chance of the free first month morphing into an expensive second month.