Setting up Ning

School for us doesn't start until September 14th but I've completed all my computer changes for the year (dual monitor, 1Tb hard drive & 500Gb network hard drive, N-router & card, new headphone-mic) and my nephew has gone back home so I've got no more excuses to avoid getting down to work.
I had to decide how to work it this year: two years ago the school decided to use Sharepoint for our course management system. From a user perspective, it was less than successful although I do understand they're using it as a complete portal for the school. Having used Blackboard for the previous 6 years, it was hoped there would be major steps forward but Sharepoint seems stuck on the centralized-control paradigm and the opportunity to (easily) create, incorporate & share content by users (outside of Word documents) is limited. Adding content beyond the basic document is very similar to old Access Reports. Not user friendly.
More importantly, it is Internet Explorer centric. I understand that from a business perspective, it is the simplest thing to require the use of a particular browser. A friend who works at BMO loves Sharepoint... but he is also locked down on his desktop and thinks the new themes in Powerpoint 2003 are cutting edge (they haven't evalutated 2007 for internal use yet). The police department also uses Sharepoint well but again, they are not exactly a creative industry. We have students & teachers, each with their own tablet and administrative control over it. They are supposed to be experimenting; discovery is their job! And so they use the creative tools: Firefox with all its addons, Chrome (cuz it's Google), Safari (cuz some have Macs at home), Opera... and other more obscure browsers. And they have iPhones and Blackberries. Sharepoint doesn't work completely on any of them. Okay, Sharepoint works on your Blackberry if you want to plug in $4000 on the server -- and I hope our IT department does do this if only to show they're thinking proactively.
So that's one of the main reasons I'm not using Sharepoint for my classes this year. I flipped back & forth between Elgg & Ning and went with Ning because (a) I don't have my own server (and don't want to pay for one) and (b) don't have time to do all the coding. We'll push Ning as hard as we can this year and see what happens. Maybe Sharepoint will grow in the next year? We're apparently hiring a Sharepoint programmer ($$$) to do stuff for us.