
Ask HN: What The Hell Does Sharepoint Do? - jasonlbaptiste
It's Microsoft's fastest growing product and tons of people use it, but it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain.  What exactly would you say it does?
======
solutionyogi
What's up with all the MS hate? This thread reads like a Slashdot thread and
not an HN thread. Pardon me, I feel that the OP is not sincere. He already has
a preconceived notion (OP quote, 'it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to
explain') about the product and wants to reinforce it.

Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked
in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint
can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared
company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in
documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document
from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it,
it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have
to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users
don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully
solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users.

Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned.

Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users
can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously.

Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom
code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a
Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an
Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing
manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in
around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part
is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a
little bit before you can start customizing the portal.

Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office
applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on
which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy
to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify
it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows
platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer.

If you have further questions, ask away.

~~~
DuncanIdaho
Atlassian Confluence or whole Atlassian suite.

Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better (office
integration is obviously much better on SP). Also you can get pretty
impressive Confluence/Sharepoint integration.

Also if you're already using Domino platform in house - you could go the Lotus
Connections + Quickr way - getting full Open Office (Symphony) integration.

Both these solutions being much cheaper AND more extensible than SharePoint.
Plus collaboration capabilities of Atlassian or IBM solutions being much
better than SP's

Don't get me wrong - I believe that SP is pretty good - just not for an IT
company with tech savvy users - it would be probably better to look somewhere
else.

~~~
swombat
_Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better_

Much better according to you. Not according to the hordes of non-geeks in
large corporations, who don't even know that there are alternatives.

Compared to sharing a spreadsheet by email or via a shared drive with no
locking, Sharepoint is pretty good!

~~~
DuncanIdaho
Basically you're saying the same as me...

We do have SP in our company, we also have lots of other stuff - we use JIRA
for issue tracking for example. I also spent quite some time evaluating
Confluence. And what I figured out was that getting to integrate whole of our
infrastructure and different existing document repositories (they're all over
the place technologically and physically) would be way easier and more
flexible using Atlassian suite.

That's because we work on so many different platforms (.Net, Domino, Java,
Oracle, MSSQL,...). And since SP is very typical of MS software (great
integration with anything MS - and other stuff does not exist) - for our
situation an principal/technology agnostic system is much much better in the
long run.

But as far as non-geeks go in monolythic MS stack companies - ofcourse SP is
AWESOME :)

------
arebop
SharePoint is essentially an HTML + JScript + MSIE-DOM interface to a network
file share full of MSOffice documents. It's a modular ASP.NET application with
some modules that help you use the Web to emulate the shared folder setup your
IT middle-managers know and love. There are some minor modules, such as a lame
survey system. There are hooks for integrating with InfoPath for simple form
<-> database apps, and WWF for "workflow" (state machine), and SAP for ... ERP
goodness I guess.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Let me rephrase the question:

What is the benefit/value prop to a normal everyday person and why would they
use it/love it?

~~~
tptacek
It is a very, very easy way to build document-centric internal applications
for enterprises that use .DOC and .XLS files (meaning, every enterprise). It's
popular for exactly the same reason Access was popular: it drastically reduces
the cost of basic business applications.

Normal everyday people don't get much direct benefit from it, although they do
benefit indirectly:

* They don't have to implement business processes by "mailing form 3021-C to Clara in Purchasing"

* It sets a lowest common denominator for bizapps that is better than what enterprises get from bespoke .NET and J2EE dev.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_It is a very, very easy way to build document-centric internal applications
for enterprises that use .DOC and .XLS files (meaning, every enterprise)._

 _Every_ enterprise uses MS Office? I don't think so.

------
Lendal
In a word, it is a CMS. But being from Microsoft, you know it has to be
excessively complicated. So take Drupal, but build it with IIS, ASP.NET,
Microsoft SQL Server, XSLT and Search. Make sure you throw in plugins that
make it manage Microsoft Office documents very well, with hooks into things
like Outlook, and there you have it. It's nice because it has lots of
features, but the flip side is it's prone to break down with no way to restore
from backup because the restore process is so complicated. It also gets lots
and lots of patches every month. Takes up so much memory and CPU that you
actually need a _farm_ of them and that's where the complications really
start. If you can stick to a single server and small workgroup it's usable. If
your company has more than two dozen people in it, you're in for a full-time
job to keep the thing working.

~~~
officemedium
I really don't want to mention our product again on the same page, but you
mentioned Drupal, which is what we built our, I guess I have to say,
Sharepoint alternative: OfficeMedium ( I won't spam another link on the same
page )

I think we're on the same page though: Simplicity is key.

Drupal is the best...

~~~
Barnabas
I have no such scruples: <http://www.officemedium.com/>

~~~
officemedium
Haha..

If you're into Drupal, check out our initial case study on the development.
We've put together some interesting innovation for the platform.

<http://drupal.org/node/599402>

------
nl
It is usually sold as a way to make Office collaborative. It also has a set of
badly implemented other features which allow it to check boxes on product
comparison feature lists.

It also sucks.

It sucks like Microsoft products used to suck, back when Microsoft was evil,
not just irrelevant.

Did you ever use Windows 3.1? It's roughly that level of quality - crashes
frequently, is difficult to navigate and relies on people begging others to do
things that should be easy ("can you upload this document because I can't find
the correct place").

As a specific example, one of the primary use-cases for it involves a person
uploading a word document, and then other finding it. The problems with
uploading are numerous, but we'll ignore them for the moment (sufficient to
say that depending on which version of Word you have you may or may not be
able to save directly to the Sharepoint repository, and of course it might
crash while saving, losing anything you have done). The real problem is the
search - by default it only searches on office metadata, so finding "Template
for xxx" is no problem, but unless everyone correctly sets up their metadata
you can never find the documents. Apparently it can be reconfigured to index
content as well, but at in the first place I came across it I found it more
effective to build my own search index by crawling the webdav directly
structure (That was in Java, with NTLM authentication, extracting text from MS
office document - so that shows how "easy" it was). The company used that
index for years, because Sharepoint was so sucky.

Sharepoint sucks - I hope Google Wave kills it, but if you are doing a start
up aimed at it please, please, please succeed!

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Translation: I did not understand how to set up indexing or search on my
Sharepoint installation. In addition, I was unable to make it stable.

This is not like using BaseCamp, guys. These huge featurefests from Microsoft
are complex animals and require training and work to get right.

Use a hosted box and let somebody else worry about all of that.

~~~
nl
Yes, or pay someone to do it for you. That's another complaint - it's really
consulting-ware, but sold as end user installable.

(And I didn't have admin rights, so I did what I could to work around the
problems)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ha, you don't have admin rights and were installing groupware software ...?
That's not exactly Microsoft's problem is it, that's messed up.

~~~
nl
Who said I was installing anything? I only got involved because I tried to
find a document on it and couldn't

So I built a search index.

Which worked better than the Sharepoint version (This was Sharepoint 2001, and
I don't think that supported full text).

Incidentally, the company I was at was a MS Solution Provider (tm), so they
did have some expertise in installing software.

My view is that any software which has defaults as bad as this sucks.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_[...] sold as end user installable.

(And I didn't have admin rights, so I did what I could to work around the
problems)_

If the problem was not the installability then you fail to mention the
antecedent to "the problems" in your post. I think it was a reasonable
conclusion from what you wrote that you were "installing software and had
problems because of permissions".

I wasn't saying you were wrong to install it, some corporate environments
require workarounds themselves!

------
shaddi
Enterprise wiki, sharing, and collaboration. From Microsoft, which the buying
of never got anyone fired for.

~~~
taitems
Oops, I meant to reply, not upvote.

Sharepoint is only really utilised because it comes as part of Microsoft's
enterprise package. More often than not it is recommended/purchased by the IT
department solely, without any other input from management. Large companies
can expect massive seat-based licensing costs in the millions, year long
implementation timelines and poor uptake rates. I will probably get downvoted
but I speak the truth. People _should_ be fired for their choice.

~~~
gaius
_More often than not it is recommended/purchased by the IT department solely,
without any other input from management_

Actually the opposite is true with most corporate software. That's why it's so
bad.

~~~
snagage
Absolutely agree. It's always been targeted at convincing management. "can do
everything", "empower business users", etc.

------
roqetman
It is something that managers love, and admins hate. It is an over-engineered
mess that doesn't do what you'd expect it to do, but does a lot of what you
don't need it to do. After supporting it for two years, I was happy to drop it
for several other solutions that combined did what Sharepoint is supposed to
do properly. I know, this was a non-answer.

~~~
dualogy
No, I would say it's something that managers AND admins love, the latter
because it will keep them in work forever. Developers and users hate it =)

------
renkeyes
Based on the implementation at my workplace, SP seems to have value as a
hybrid intranet site and file share. Each department has their own section in
which non-IT folks can create simple HTML content and can attach documents. It
is also relatively simple to share this content with other groups as needed,
based on membership in Active Directory groups.

More controversially, SP also seems to be replacing MS Access as the non-IT-
sanctioned application platform of choice. Instead of creating Access
databases on a file share, people use SP "lists" to store data. The
controversy stems from the fact that these lists often outgrow the practical
limits of SP and need to be migrated to "real" systems.

Many people also seem to want to use SP as a Content Management System or even
as the preferred application development platform (in which all application
functionality is delivered as SP "web parts", which plug in to SP pages).
These uses seem to cause as many problems as they solve, but that's just my
opinion.

~~~
ahpeeyem
"Instead of creating Access databases on a file share, people use SP "lists"
to store data"

This seems like a better situation than with Access though; at least the
Sharepoint list apps are all located within one system; not as discrete files
that may be scattered across laptops, desktops, email accounts and server
shares, with who knows how many versions.

~~~
renkeyes
Agreed, and SharePoint tends to be backed up on the DBMS backup schedule,
which is usually more frequent than the file-share/NAS schedule, which is
another bonus.

It's the "non-sanctioned" aspect that tends to cause issues down the line, not
moving to SharePoint from MS Access. I could've been more clear in that
section of my comment.

------
DanielBMarkham
SharePoint does everything.

Think of it as a document posting, storage, and workflow system, where
documents can be plan text or html, or any kind of office doc.

So, for instance, you can easily set up a web form for people to fill out to
get a service, then set up the routing for that form to get approved, checked,
and added into the corp database.

Or a doc could be a blog, with threaded comments. Or a catalog system, with
ordering and inventory.

It does everything. SharePoint is love.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
"SharePoint does everything."

That's exactly why it sucks balls.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sorry I forgot the <sarcasm> tag. It's not love.

People have different theories of software. There's 37 Signals and then
there's Microsoft's.

I'm not a huge fan, but I acknowledge that it does a lot. It's Microsoft's
server strategy for the next decade or so, most likely: a place where office
docs can live and move around in automated business processes. That means it
has a learning curve -- a learning curve that most users will never climb.
Which means yes, it's going to suck for a lot of people.

As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in theory,
but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like it or not,
based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score better than
those without.

I don't especially like this situation, but there it is. Simply complaining
about it is not going to make it go away.

~~~
_phred
> As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in
> theory, but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like
> it or not, based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score
> better than those without.

That is, in itself, a very interesting observation. Reminds me of PG's talk on
Viaweb and the use-case for their template language: "users always want an
upgrade path, even though as a rule they'll never take it."

<http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt>

------
qeorge
It allows companies to build knowledge portals for their organizations. It
provides building blocks in the form of wikis, forums, and knowledgebases to
achieve this goal. If you've ever used Community Server you'd find Sharepoint
very similar.

I believe it also includes document repositories, collaboration, and syncing,
and is tightly integrated with the Office suite.

Its clunkly and Microsoftish to be sure, but its here, it works, and its been
deployed across many huge organizations. Implementing a knowledge portal is
often a culture and process problem more than a software problem, and its here
that Microsoft has excelled with Sharepoint.

Its easy to write off to be sure, being made by MS and decidely "1.0", but
this is the big brand alternative to collaboration tools like Dropbox,
Etherpad, and yes, Google Wave.

------
percept
It's basically groupware: document sharing, content management and messaging,
ideal for those already working in a MS environment.

I was just mentioning to someone that over the last couple of years a lot of
the government sector jobs that used to read "ASP.NET/C#" now say
"SharePoint." I'm assuming COTS is being mandated as a cost-saving measure.

~~~
raphar
GROUPWARE!!!! that's ancient marketing!

Makes me remember when I was young and windows 3.11 for workgroups was the
sh*t ;)

------
nintendo1889
I don't really know what sharepoint is, so my viewpoint is that of an
outsider, but what I can gather from what I've read about it, it seems to be
the inspiration (or one of the inspirations) for Google Wave. Also pretty much
any job listing in I.T. seems to mention it.

It's like describing .NET before it was released. WTH is it? Here's a theorem
I'd like to posit. If you can't clearly describe a MS product, I'd say that
it's something to stay away from, for those of you that run your own
businesses and can make those decisions.

------
wglb
In addition to the good comments here, it seems that this is a way to do
collaboration within an enterprise without having to deal with DBAs and other
highly managed federations. It is an end-around to a lot of those.

As to why they don't look to free alternatives, in MS enterprise shops, that
question never comes up.

Finally, it makes it pretty hard to move away from MS if you have your whole
corporate consciousness embedded in sharepoint.

------
jasonlbaptiste
I didn't expect this thread to grow to 56 comments. Here's what astounds me:
Sharepoint is Microsoft's fasting growing business ever. Faster than windows
or office. It's also a source of 1 bil+ revenue a year. YET, comments from 40+
educated people who know technology very well cannot explain its purpose or
real value. This is or something like it is what opportunity is supposed to
look like.

~~~
mattiss
Has anybody here actually been involved in purchasing this product? What use
case did it solve for you?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I have.

I had a small team that needed to share documents related to a consulting
project. Everybody needed to use MS products, access it from the web, be able
to check-in/check-out files, have a common calendar, a team blog, and a quick
wiki for client-related information.

Sharepoint did all of that, in an integrated fashion, right out of the box. We
got it hosted for about 30 bucks a month.

In addition, everything is an RSS feed. So as people change things on a thread
you're watching, you can catch it right in your RSS reader.

~~~
andymoe
Even SharePoint services built into server 2003/2008 is pretty usable out of
the box. You can spend a few hours to a few days to get it configured
depending how much tweaking you do (and how screwed up your servers and
environment are already :-p). The newer version has pretty tight integration
with office. It beats throwing everything in public folders since they are
less flexible and harder to manage. It also beats people emailing big files
around saying "Here, print this 20MB PowerPoint for me."

If you have a few offices or remote users it is really useful. Probably not
even worth considering for less than 15 people and only if you have some
existing infrastructure. For smaller teams a hosted solution or some of the
other products mentioned might be a better fit. (123together.com and
intermedia both are OK for hosted SharePoint/exchange etc) Also, the blog and
wiki stuff is still sub-par but the check-in check out stuff for documents
does work pretty well.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Absolutely.

I hate to come off like a fanboy, but I understand what Microsoft is trying to
do with SharePoint and it makes sense to me.

I had another team that was just 2 or 3 guys working on a startup. We used
basecamp and were very happy with it.

It depends on what you want and what your skill level is. If you're highly
distributed and do a lot with Microsoft documents, then MOSS is a logical
choice (and not extremely expensive). If you're just a couple of guys kicking
around some code? Hack something together or use one of the simpler tools
available on the web.

I'd draw the line somewhere around 4 or 5 guys, not 15 -- if you're doing
something that's document-heavy. If it's just programming? I wouldn't consider
it until I reached the 8-10 person team size, at least.

------
taitems
We're running Intranet DASHBOARD. It's an incredibly cost effective
Australian-made product. When you're quoted upwards of $1 mil for Sharepoint
licenses you'll understand.

~~~
catch404
No idea why this was downvoted. Intranet DASHBOARD is very good solution if
you are looking at Sharepoint syle features.

------
reedlaw
We use Sharepoint in our university as a place for teachers to store documents
for students to download. It also serves as a portal for accessing lots of
information for different departments in the school. I work in a Chinese
university and Sharepoint is one of the few MS products the school actually
_pays_ for. They must pay for the license if they want any support, thus it
must be a huge cash cow for MS in a country where most software is pirated.

------
snagage
Sharepoint does a reasonable job at being a MS-centric document management
system, providing team collaboration spaces and being a traditional intranet.

But for everything else that it claims to be is just a huge tease.

\- It can be a CMS, but it's the worst, most inflexible, non-standard
compliant one you can imagine.

\- It can be a development platform for corporate applications. But unless
you're doing something that is ultra-simple and very close to out-of-the-box,
it's just not worth your time. Plus the whole development process is one big
hack (need Windows server, SharePoint, IDE on the same machine, position every
object manually, batch job here, keygen there, restart SP/IIS all over the
place, etc)

\- Business users are able to create small business apps and workflows - but
they'll be a complete mess and everyone will become frustrated with the bugs,
limitations and idiosyncrasies when using them.

\- You can do workflows - but the out-of-the-box workflows suck, SPD workflows
have way too many limitations and custom workflows are a big pain and alot of
work.

\- It is enterprise-y... but it has lots of non-enterprise "features".
Deleting your workflow history after 3 months, updating everything single
document with the latest datestamp when doing a service pack, broken
import/export features.

------
holdenc
Sharepoint is typical blasé Microsoft all-things-to-all-people collaborative
communications software. Unfortunately most alternatives also lack
inspiration.

------
tptacek
It is the Microsoft Access of web applications.

~~~
blasdel
You could say the same thing about CouchDB!

It seems less pejorative somehow, maybe because in its case the emphasis is on
the web, not Access.

~~~
tptacek
You can't build an entire application from within a user interface with
CouchDB. Access was _both_ a crappy database and a simple interface for
putting front-ends on that database.

~~~
blasdel
Of course you can build an entire application within CouchDB, with just a tiny
bit of bootstrapping. It ships with a very nice browser/editor, so you can
store server-side JS as documents in the database, and have a stub that evals
them.

All that's missing is 280North's Atlas.

Also, as someone who has to maintain such a thing, Access _is_ a mediocre
interface for putting frontends on databases.

------
mstevens
From the user side, two things that particularly annoyed me were:

* The search was unusuably bad. One of the worst searches I've ever used.

* The document versioning may, if you're a programmer, lead you to believe it works like source control. Then you delete a document and find there's no way to retrieve it short of reinstalling an entire sharepoint backup to a spare machine and extracting just the file you were interested in.

------
elroySF
As someone who's overseeing a rather huge implementation of SharePoint 2007 -
and as a former user of Confluence - I have to say that SharePoint does pretty
much what Confluence does (wiki, document sharing and versioning, calendaring)
except that SharePoint has far more overhead. SP setup and deployment is
highly complex, and it's very difficult for most users to fathom, requiring
hours of training. SharePoint does have some unique capabilities (e.g. Office
Suite integration - as long as you're on Windows using IE - and only half of
my audience meet that requirement), but overall Confluence wins hands down
IMHO.

------
jacquesm
Netware: the sequel.

And another nice opportunity for lock-in to ms-centric document formats.

------
ashr
This sounds like market research :)

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
if it were 15 months ago, it would be. I still have no clue what it does.

~~~
jodrellblank
So try it, it's free with Windows server, and there are free trial versions of
that around.

------
dankjaergaard
I've been an SP user and was also involved in a few projects.

From a users perspective I see SP as no more than the "My Documents" folder
moved to a browser. Sure, documents are now accessible to others, but SP does
not solve the problem of explaining what the status of the document is. So you
find someone else's doc, but you still may have to call or email to figure out
if the doc was sent to customers, accepted, etc. As a document management
platform, SP brings nothing new to the table.

Company functions like internal IT support, HR, etc. can easily setup simple
workflows, and ticketing systems. In my opinion, this is the single best thing
of SP and super valuable.

As a tech guy, I would never choose SP. First of all I find it too expensive,
and second, the lock-in pitfalls of expensive upgrades and hours and hours of
consulting to develop simple changes are just too risky (if it was my money).

So I agree with others in these comments, SP tries to do too much (and even
more in the 2010 version), and the IE only thing just pisses me off. (you can
actually use other browsers, but I found that some of the config stuff can
only be done in IE)

------
nullrend
After reading through all of the comments left here about what it does, how it
does it and the pros/cons of it, I was left wondering what would be a capable
alternative to it. Sure, I can implement a chat system, a wiki and a blogging
plaform separately, but each platform will stand apart from the others. Having
a single method of login will require additional programming and
administration skills in addition to time spent actually implementing them.

I'm currently analyzing the possibility of implementing SharePoint at work
(small office, 5 people counting myself) but do dislike the fact it would only
enhance format lock-in. Walking away from Microsoft products is _not_ a
possibility since pretty much every single document we come across is created
on Microsoft software, except for PDF documents; what I would like is increase
workgroup capabilities, regardless of document format.

So, what would be a decent alternative to it? I've seen most PHP-based systems
and have always been left wanting.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Seriously? If everybody is already using MS docs (excel, word, powerpoint,
access, xpath) and you're all on Office 2007,go ahead and use SharePoint. But
be prepared to have somebody take 40 hours or so and read 2-4 books on
maximizing Sharepoint capabilities. That person will have to handhold
everybody else for a while. If you don't want to do that, it's not worth your
time.

There are lots of hosted Sharepoint solutions you can find that aren't very
expensive. They handle the backups, hotfixes, versioning, and such, and you
guys just worry about your business.

That's much easier than trying to glue together several other services from
separate providers, in my opinion. I'm not a MS fanboy, but Sharepoint does
seem to be a logical progression from Office to something more web-centric.

~~~
blogimus
I've been using Sharepoint for 3 months so far on a big ($100M+) government
contract project. Our prime is hosting it. I'm not a fan, but I don't maintain
it and it does the job.

The most use I've gotten out of it so far is for document management and
document peer reviews. It _IS_ convenient for editing Office 2007 documents if
you're on Windows using IE. You can just checkout files through the browser.
This feature does not work for Firefox.

One big problem we have is that the VPN breaks Sharepoint links so that the
links that the people on the inside pass around break for those of us using
VPN. That's not necessarily a Sharepoint issue, but it is annoying nonetheless
as it does not have pretty URLs.

------
netsp
There are a lot of comments on this thread by now and I don't think that
anyone who doesn't already know the answer to this question can read this page
and get it. Words like collaboration and sharing don't seem to be adding up to
anything. There are a lot of very different things that could be described in
this way equally as accurately.

Something's not right.

~~~
jodrellblank
What's not right? Sharepoont is not one thing. It's a framework for building
consistent versions of the business process things you currently ad-hoc with
emails and documents named v.2-revised-Jen.

It's Microsoft's answer to your business problems like 'how can my team have
internal blogs?' and 'we need document versioning' and 'we pass documents
around by email to get approval and steps get missed' and 'how can we
computerise these simple form based procedures?'

------
johndoe77
If you've ever used MediaWiki or TWiki and have been asked to switch to
SharePoint you'll want to hurt someone/thing.

~~~
nwatson
Fortunately at my workplace (a Microsoft/Exchange/Blackberry-Enterprise-Server
-related software shop) we went the other direction. Sharepoint was so bad
people got used to using e-mail and file shares instead. By the time I managed
to get a TWiki in there it was kind of late, it's hard to break entrenched
habits.

Sharepoint doesn't easily let you create free-form context and structure for
content. TWiki takes a minimalist approach that's very easy to use.

------
michaelneale
It _seems_ like there is growing interest in integrating products with it (non
MS products) - might be a market growing for add ons, who knows. I only hear
screams of pain.

~~~
dualogy
Your two last statements are correct.

------
TwoSheds
MindTouch (<http://www.mindtouch.com/>) competes directly with SharePoint and
the base system is open source. Aaron R. Fulkerson from the company creating
it was interviewed in FLOSS weekly recently (<http://twit.tv/floss89>) Sounded
pretty cool, and certainly worth a look if you have any doubts about
introducing yet another lock-in to Microsoft platform.

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highplains
makes a born and bred Linux person have panic attacks trying to support it.

Stay far away if you dont know MS products. I deal with it now, im not an MS
person, its rough.

~~~
dualogy
You don't have to be a Linux person to get that feeling. I've been doing
SharePoint development for exactly three years now (before that, classical
.NET), and it keeps being 'rough' (not in a cool way) and sucky. Yes, every
once in a while you still get a moments worth of development joy, before you
run into another entirely MS-inflicted, never-seen-before bug, spend more
hours re-administering IIS, web.config, SQL Server and SP itself, or mostly
wait for ages on a 4 GB machine for Visual Studio's SharePoint extensions to
compile your code into their CAB-based "solution packages". There's no reason
why this should take forever but it does. Sure, I'm on a Mac and love Python,
CouchDB etc. privately and for hobbyist stuff -- but sadly, the market that
pays _my_ bills rewards MS crap at the moment.

This is a market ripe for disruption though, because when developers and HNers
realize something sucks, then corporate IT will eventually too, 5 years down
the line. The question is where the disruption will come from. Some people bet
on Wave, myself excluded.

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jasonlbaptiste
why has no one just made a really easy alternative to this? sure there's
things like huddle and google sites, but they're still way too difficult. I
have shit to share with people in my company and i want to do it simply
without tons of bloat or difficulty. In essence:

posterous:blogging :: ???:sharepoint

~~~
officemedium
<http://www.officemedium.com>

But I might be biased...

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
very cool. i do like it. reminds me of what we wanted to do with Publictivity.
Sadly both have way too many features.

~~~
officemedium
Too many? I don't like to sound like I'm "spamming" out my product, but I
believe it's designed in such a simple manner than anything included that you
aren't interested in using, sits quietly in the background.

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chanux
Box.net was calling a war with it.

<http://sites.box.net/simple>

~~~
nedwin
Love this, go you good thing!

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yrashk
it makes you feel entreprisey!

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javery
Ironically the first time I was forced to use Sharepoint was when I was
writing a book for O'Reilly. They used it as a rudimentary source control
system for documents.

The best definition is that it's "an intranet in a box"

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awa
Sharepoint in clear english: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12Jb5Z2xaE>

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egodeath
the "enterprise wiki" is horrible, so that one's a mystery to me

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foogaamoo
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12Jb5Z2xaE>

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dhughes
the file exists!

