SharePoint list has permission down to the list level, but what if we need to control view, edit and display for each column? I have been researching on a lot of add-ons around the Internet and luckily found one that works just brilliantly. There's this add-on called SPListDisplaySetting, hosted on CodePlex, which allows you to do that. Strange thing is the first time I installed it, it didn't work as it cooked up my list to not showing the action toolbar and i had to re-install WSS to get it back in shape.
Sharepoint comes with a great GUI tool that allows administrator to create and manage data structure, that means we could create our own columns and set up the associations, etc. However, the default field types out from the box are limited. The great news is we could create our own field types with own business logic. I just tried to create a custom field type called "Phone Number", which is a standard text field but with Javascript validator that validates the input string to be a valid phone number.
I have been digging into SharePoint for awhile now and it seems to be more and more interesting and challenging, considering I already have experiences with so many different Content Management Systems. Suprisingly, SharePoint seems to work very similar to Helium, so that eased my process of going in and out of Sharepoint.