I have been working with another "developer" who is building a SharePoint site based on requirements that I have gathered from an end user.  In going through the security settings for the site, something seemed to be missing and it took me a minute to figure out what it was.  From what I could see, it looks as though the Author level of access has been left out of SP.

To me, the status level of Author goes hand in hand with the idea of ownership.  I have always considered the Author of a document in Notes to be the owner of the document at that point in time, regardless of whether or not that person created this particular document.  Author access only works with Author and Reader field values, so I am guess that equivalent field types don't exist in SP.

This idea of Authorship is central to every workflow application I have ever built.  I'll be damned if I am going to "trust" my users to only edit a document when it's their turn in the review cycle.  They are lucky if they can even see things that aren't ready for them to approve/edit.

While SP easily gives you the ability to allow users to edit any document on the site, I couldn't see how to set a user's access to only allow them to edit documents that they have created.  You could modify the rights for a document to only allow specific people to edit the document, but then the connection to the central ACL is severed forever.  The model employed by SP seems eerily similar to the model employed on a file server and we all know how much fun it is when 2 people try to edit a file at the same time.

Now to be totally fair, I only looked at SP for a few minutes, so I might have missed something totally obvious.  The server is currently running WSS, so this might be a feature that you get when you upgrade to MOSS.  Or this might be one of those core Notes features that seems necessary to us, but isn't that important to other vendors.

Will someone who has more experience with SP care to comment and set me straight?