Is Sharepoint worth the investment, effort and upheaval from simple shared folders?

I have been busy reducing the number of physical servers by utilising virtual server technology (which you can read about in this post on my other Blog: Slamming down the Virtualisation Gauntlet). But now I am looking at trying to improve the end user experience and in particular the way data files are stored and accessed.

For our user base, and we have worked this way for a very long time, user generated data has never really been actively managed in a way I would be comfortable with. We have issued two drive letters for file storage. The first is what we would call a personal drive (but I guess it’s really a user drive) where only the particular user can store and access their files (other than an administrator). The second is a mapping to a shared drive - the shared drive contains sub-folders that are locked down and accessible to specific groups of users. We used to have a third public read only drive but it never really got used that much as users preferred shared drives. That is about it - users have then been left to their own devices to create sub-folders, manage their files and think about which files to share with others. Some people might use the term KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) to describe this method of information management but as technology develops I keep thinking about the shortcomings of this way of working.

The problem is that these drives are filling up with information which isn’t particularly well organised or accessible. Users organise information differently leading to inconsistency when looking for information. Also, when a user changes department, or moves on, there is always great difficulty in ascertaining which information in their user folder should be retained or moved to another user. Common information is difficult to access due to it being in different places for different reasons: for example, if we need to find all user documents relating to Customer X or Product Y, it would be a huge and difficult challenge. There is also the management of information groups: if a user needs to be added or removed from a group this has to be done via Active Directory so requires some IT intervention.

I would really like to make more intelligent and structured use of this increasing amount of information rather than the old sub-folder structure that is currently in place. I keep looking with envy towards things like Wikis, Blogs, Document Management, Version Control, Newsgroups, Intranets, Image Directories, Search and the like that start to make some sense and organisation of information in a common and consistent way and I wonder if this would be a better mechanism for user generated information management. That leads me to SharePoint.

I have looked at it a few times but have yet to fully commit and drive it out to the user base as I feel the change would be quite dramatic and I guess the immediate uphill learning curve for the user base might be more of a concern than the long term benefits. However, SharePoint seemingly provides a much superior way of organising, accessing and searching information - but is this the right way to go? Will it give the huge advantages that I dream of or are there pitfalls to be aware of?