I have a network here at home with 3 different computers going through a
router that provides my internet access, but forget about the internet
access, the main point to keep in mind is that I have 3 PC's and they're on
the same network.

Now, the problem is this...

There are several users here at my home, family members to be exact. Each
user has his/her own xp account on any one of the machines. This means each
of them that uses outlook for example, do not share contacts, and they are
unable to share documents very efficiently. To share documents they have to
be pretty knowledgable with the file system, etc.

What i'd like to do is set up some sort of a web portal, call it a home
intranet, to enable us to share information centrally and totally agnositic
of what account you're logged in as except for perhaps the site itself
authenticating you either with forms auth or windows auth.

Is there a packaged product that will meet my needs by Microsoft? Sharepoint
is typically an enterpise gig. I have looked but don't see a scaled down
version of it for home intranet use. Perhaps i'm blind? What are my options
for a solution?

Thanks
-B

Look for Share Point Services rather than Share Point Server and all XP
machines will need to be runing XP Pro.
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To share documents you don't need any specific product, it's just a matter of
changing the way Windows treats file storage.  You need to allocate one
computer as the server, and create a share on that (Outside of the Documents
and Settings structure) which everyone can access. This computer does then
need to be on most  of the time, that's the only drwaback.

Microsoft's standalone email products such as Outlook(express) don't lend
themselves to groupware or collaborative setup, they are very much based on
the "personalised user" approach.  The corproate solution is to install an
Exchange server and clients, but that would be overkill here.

However, other free or low-cost mailprograms do provide better
inter-operability between users. Pegasus Mail is one of the best for
workgroup use, allowing shared address-books, direct messaging between
computers, etc. Mozilla Thunderbird can also be set-up to allow centralised
storage of email. Again, both will require that one computer act as the
mailstore, and this computer rmust be on  in order to use email. 

Web-based facilities of the kind you mention do exist, but I question
whether they are very useable, except for small files. If you have  50x 5MB
photos to store, do you really want to send these to and fro via the Internet
link at relatively low speed?

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