How we got started - continued

After the week long training session on implementing and administering SharePoint, we thought we were ready to tackle designing a site collection and our new portal intranet page. Wait a minute... not so fast. Enter SharePoint Designer 2007. Can anyone figure out how to use this new tool? SharePoint Designer 2007 is the replacement for FrontPage and we were under the assumption that anyone that developed in FrontPage could easily transition to SharePoint Designer 2007. Wrong !! OK, now what ?? We are a group that is usually able to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. The only problem was that there were no resources out there for SharePoint Designer 2007, at least as of that time. I think the books are just hitting the press. We managed to find a group willing (and able) to come to our organization to teach a class on SharePoint Designer 2007. The four day class was rocky. Just when the muddy water started to clear, it was like a big rock was thrown in and the murkiness returned. It was like a roller coaster of confusion and clarity. After training was over, it was time to get to work again. The web developers and I locked ourselves in a room to see if we could hammer something out. At the end of the day we had implemented a basic site collection with some simple customizations. This is where we are caught up with the present time and I will continue to journalize our experiences in the implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. My goal is to document both good and bad experiences. I hope others who have anything to contribute to what we are doing will do so. Maybe we can be of some help to someone attempting to implement SharePoint. Let's collaborate on our experiences !!