<p>For the better part of 10 years + we have relied on various network mapped drives to allow file sharing.  One drive letter for sharing files between teams, a seperate file share for the entire organization, a third for personal use etc.  I would like to move away from this and am trying to decide if an ECM/Sharepoint type solution, or home grown app, is worth the cost and the way to go?  Or if we should simply remain relying on login scripts/mapped drives for file sharing due to its relative simplicity?  Does anyone have any exeperience within their own organization or thoughts on this?</p>

<p>Thanks. </p>

SharePoint is very good at document sharing.
Documents generally follow a process for approval, have permissions, live in clusters... and these things lend themselves well to SharePoints document libraries.
However there are somethings that don't lend themselves well to living inside SharePoint... do you have a virtual hard drive (.vhd) file that you want to share with a workmate? Not such a good idea to try and put a 20GB file into SharePoint.
SharePoint can handle large files, and so can SQL Server behind it... but do you want your SQL Server bandwidth being saturated by such large files? Do you want your backup of SQL Server to hold copies of such large files multiple times?
I believe that there are a few Microsoft partners who offer the ability to disassociate file blobs from the SharePoint database, so that SharePoint can hold the metadata and a file system holds the actual files, and SharePoint simply becomes the gateway to manage access, permissions, and offer a centralised interface to files throughout an organisation. This would offer you the best of both worlds.
Right now though, I consider SharePoint ideal for documents, and I keep large files (that are not document centric) on Windows file shares.