With a little experience at using Sharepoint, there is not much in it that is, in fact, trivial. It can be used, as is suggested to build an intranet, (as it is an "enterprise" tool), I would add " but not much else"; <Argument Spoiler> I am somewhat biased about what comes from the Dark Side.</end spoiler> My suspicion is that it was built to fill a gap in the "Microverse", that other products were adequately filling at the time but not to Microsoft's profit. Time and tide has caught up with it, HTML 5 and Javascript are considerably more easy to learn and use, with a much smaller footprint. They also do not cost much, training resources can be found with a few clicks and keystrokes, and there are whole communities of people willing to help projects of any kind. Coupled with something like PHP or Ruby on Rails or Python, and a MYSQL, PostGreSQL, or even, dare I say it, Oracle, database, you could more than meet any need for an SMS and a CMS, an Intranet, a web site relatively quickly, if not easily - but then, what is?
There is another issue, and something not spoken of a lot anywhere that I am aware of, but I believe is of increasing importance, and becoming increasingly problematic. The desire for one stop fixes, magic bullet approaches by people with a limited understanding of the technologies involved, forces those people to ignore the greater potential for disaster that single technology frameworks are presenting. The attraction of "integration" is a powerful argument that can override any other consideration. Smaller open source systems remain easier to troubleshoot, but because they look complex, they are seen as being less reliable. As well, the support for fixes of open source projects is quite high, even small limited projects attract adherents, but the tools themselves have rather large support bases. The Moodle Community is one such, but so is the PHP and MySQL and Javascript, and so on communities. The perennial question "I am trying to [do this...] can be found in all those FAQs and forums, and usually well answered. Try getting that with Sharepoint.
