Bob Mixon replied to a bit of a flame complaining about SharePoint. Most of Bob’s comments are right, and a lot of the replies (esp. by Mark ) are pretty accurate. So are some of the complaints too. So now, my thoughts…
- SharePoint allows you to organise your document and processes - but doesn’t mean that you will. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink - and this is true of every document management, content management and process management app I’ve ever worked with. It is a good point, but it is not SharePoint specific. Books could be (and are) written about getting users to buy into change. Change management is hard, and often over looked by supplier and by the organisation.
- Wikis? WTF? If that’s all you want, install a specialist Wiki app - damn straight, “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. Enterprises don’t just want Wiki’s though. They don’t just want Blogs either. They want content management, collaborative working, extranets, multiple authenication providers, reporting, exposure of business data, including data for other systems, document management, process management - the whole gamut. SharePoint provides all of those things, not as well as a specialist application - but it does it in one, rather than many apps. I’ve said it before SharePoint is like a Swiss army knife - there are better knives, and there are better cork-screws, but this way, I only have to have one tool. You’ve only got one (albeit huge zeppelin) system to administer, only one (huge zeppelin) backup to run, etc..
- Training? Yes, there’s a lot, but the post misses the point that if you had lots of little “KISS” systems, all looking cute and “Web 2.0″ (UCK!) then you’re going have just as much training to do - ‘cos you’re going to have SO many systems to administer. Further, you don’t need to know it all. You’ll have adminstration happening at different levels, and development happening within difference aspects of SharePoint. For example, I specialise more in workflow than my colleagues - they might specialise in search, or content management. SharePoint 2007 is too big for just one person, but that’s true of many enterprise sized systems
- The poster’s “What will they do” section is wrong. Totally wrong. What they’ll do is issue a couple of service packs, or maybe release a SharePoint 2009, it being a patched release. There are a lot of kinks in SharePoint 2007, and they need to be ironed out. But Microsoft will do that - they are actually pretty good about doing that (at least, when there is commercial pressure - or a good open source alternative. Firefox, anyone?)
- Get rid of the hierarchy? Tagging? These lines suggest to me that the author really doesn’t get SharePoint. Content Types are far more useful than tagging. Tagging does not scale Enterprise wide. And as for hierarchy - SharePoint has so much less hierarchy than most of the systems I’ve worked with. It certainly has less than a network file share. Which actually, I take issue with - I think people get hierarchies, and that they have a place.
- Page weight? Bang on, I have to agree with the poster on this. The default pages are too heavy. The Core.js file is too big, and certainly should be easier to remove from a published internet site. And the CSS is just awful. Core.css it vast, complex, and you have rules being overridden from all over the place. Even the neat functionality in SharePoint Designer doesn’t help overcome this. Further, MOSS is not WCAG ‘AA’ accessible out of the box - but this is a requirement for the governmental sector in the UK.
- Search? SharePoint search, used correctly with Content Types is better than Google search. Google is great at full-text search, and I’d have to say better than SharePoint (though SharePoint isn’t bad - I remember ‘Excite’). SharePoint has the advantage of metadata around the document though, and this is what makes it better. Yeah, if you just dump all your documents into a site without classifying them, then yeah, Google will do better than SharePoint - but your system will soon become unusable. Though I don’t like the amount of work you have to do get Search user interfaces the way you want them.
- Installation was no worse than any other enterprise app I’ve had to install - indeed, it was simpler than many!
So yeah, SharePoint 2007 isn’t some neat, tidy, focussed little web 2.0 app. It’s not lightweight - but nor was it meant to be. It is an enterprise grade single application designed to provide a lot of different aspects of functionality. It doesn’t do them as well as specialist apps, but it can save you buying multiple applications, and having multiple things to look after - just like a Swiss army knife.
