From the sound of it, they want something that runs itself, with end-users maintaining content. IMO that never works. When everyone can post content, and no one actively maintains it, you end up with an unusable hairball. Someone has to have a primary mission of maintaining and pruning the site or it's little better than a shared network drive.

Lucky for me, they have not fallen down that rabbit hole. SharePoint pretty much encourages that view, and like you, I have never seen it work.

The problem with SharePoint is that it is a collaboration tool, and what I'm looking for is more of an information distribution tool. We have a monthly processing cycle, and a bunch of little 2 and 3 person groups responsible for parts of that cycle. What we want is a good way for those groups to keep the other groups updated on where they are in the processing cycle.

SharePoint would work great for what I need, except that I can't pick a few pieces and integrate them into a framework I setup. Rather SharePoint is a huge framework of it's own and I'll have to integrate my stuff into it.

Jay

The internet publishing part of Milestones looks like one part of what we are looking for. But we are looking for a full portal not just one part. The goal is to use it for document distirbution, news distribution, project status distribution, report distribution, company calendar distribution and so on.

There will not be a lot of updating done through the portal. But since there is going to be many parts to this I'm looking for a decent framework, or what I really want, which is a set of components I can drop into a application I build.

If it was just one thing, I would dig in and do it by hand. I've built frameworks for applications before, I've built most of these components at one time or another and I've done automation against MS backends. But there is too much here to do it that way.

Jay