Why not just use Sharepoint?

Let’s look at a pretty common business scenario.  Let’s say your organisation has a sales team (customer focus) and a finance team (contract focus).  Who is the custodian of the sales contract for a particular customer?  Where does the actual contract and the six versions it needed to get to its final form reside?  On top of that the sales team is split based on geography so the New York team don’t need to be able to see the Chicago team sales contracts (in fact, your organisation may actively not want differing sales teams browsing through other customers’ contracts).  So in Sharepoint you need to decide whether the contract resides in the Customer or Finance document library.  If it is in the Customer library and if any of your finance team need to access it they have to navigate through to that Library to retrieve it.  They also need access to all Customer contracts (not just the ones for New York) so they will need access to potentially more document libraries or you get more accountants (and who wants that!) and split their workload by geography.  How then do you get the accountants sharing best practice on budget issues etc.  The temptation to just email a copy becomes too great and heaven forbid if one of your customers moves their head office from Chicago to New York!!  Your Sharepoint administrator will be on stress leave in no time.