
Ask YC: Thoughts on MSFT Sharepoint? - jasonlbaptiste
Curious what everyone thinks of MSFT sharepoint.  What do you think it does exactly? It's pretty vague
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rman666
I think it massively sucks. I work with it every day. It is a slow beast. It
does have widgets for blogging and wiki pages, but even the simple task of
blogging is painful with it. One of the things I've heard, but not explored
myself, is that at the back-end is a giant SQL-ish database and every page and
site created with it is something like a single record, so security
administration is nightmare as it is not nearly granular enough. I'd like to
learn otherwise. At the same time, it seems MS is committed to SharePoint, so
I'm sure there will be ongoing improvements. Honestly, most of the time I'd
rather have WordPress and a good Wiki in-house. At the same time, I think I'd
be hard-pressed to identify a competitor to all SharePoint has to offer
(workflow, document management, check-out/in, integration with instant
messenger, etc.).

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kogir
It actually does store everything in a huge MSSQL database behind the scenes.
From an administrative standpoint this is wonderful because there is only one
thing to back up.

Security is pretty good. You can usually set permissions on a per page or per
item basis, but it's a pain to do so.

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barryrandall
I can assure you that backing up SharePoint is a bit more complicated than a
single database backup. There's a bit of a left hand/right hand problem at
Microsoft when it comes to this product. The SharePoint team seems to go out
of their way to make SQL Server-based backups painful, and they ignore the
high availability technologies built in to the DBMS. You'd think they were
trying to be database agnostic.

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goofygrin
It's quite easy to say 'SharePoint Sux' and move along. However after about
3-4 years of Sharepoint consulting, I feel qualified to say "Sharepoint can
suck" :)

Sharepoint is pitched as the consumer facing glue for your enterprise.

You need document templates? You need to discuss a project? You need to
collaborate about something? You need to have a workflow around
tasks/forms/documents? You want a company portal for all information?

It is the definition of "Enterprise Software" and is pure overkill for the
small business unless you are using the free WSS version that comes with
Windows Server 2003.

That said, there are some very cool things that you can do with it when you
integrate MOSS with Office 2007 like multiple shared calendars and task list
integration.

You will have to ignore the magic behind the scenes though!

Oh... one more thing... skinning Sharepoint to something less than boxy is
very difficult, especially if you have a large portal.

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babul
You seem to have good experience using Sharepoint (>3yrs). Can out point out
any good alternatives you think are worth considering (especially free/open-
source offerings)?

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coolestuk
OpenGroupware

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babul
Thanks. What do you think of Trac?

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DanielBMarkham
By SharePoint I'm assuming you mean Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
2007

I had a client last year that was looking into it, so I did a lot of research
and playing around for them. I probably read about eight books on it. In
addition, I wrote a small application that automates the hooking up of
Sharepoint into other Enterprise datastores (like web services or DB2
databases) I also am using at my one of my large clients. I know a little
about it.

Yes, it's a beast, but large-app software is like that, so everybody stop
complaining. It also has fine-grained security, so that comment was off-base.
I think the learning curve is too steep for Joe Blow the startup guy to use to
it's maximum effectiveness. On the other hand, it does enough out of the box
to make it an interesting option for small teams. The shared calendaring in
Outlook and shared list management in Access make it attractive. Add in
offline access with Groove, and learning just a few features can give a team a
lot of power.

To really understand MOSS you have to realize that it is the future of
Microsoft's platform: shove everything out onto the web, then write workflow
and security and forms management and office integration into it. Office
becomes more of a gateway to use SharePoint than a stand-alone product.

I know the first time I saw the workflow engine work _inside_ of Office docs I
thought that was a pretty cool integration. Likewise, endusers being able to
create their own web pages with live data from other systems? Neat. I can see
a natural progression for a startup to begin with Groove, then graduate to
MOSS once things start cooking. It would certainly be better than using a
dozen other free apps that all do not interoperate -- as long as you don't eat
up precious time fooling around with it. The whole point is to leverage the
parts that work together naturally, not become a MOSS expert.

But the look of the thing? Butt-ugly. No getting around that. The UI is so bad
it's hard to convince people that there is as much going on under the hood as
there is.

In short, I'm not crazy about it, but the more I think about it, the more
value I can see it bringing a small team.

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craigbellot
Sharepoint makes it easy for end users to create database driven websites.

Sharepoint enterprise deployments are rapidly growing for the same reasons IE
grew so fast and Google Calendar killing Kiko; Integration.

Sharepoint integrates with Outlook, Word, Active directory, IIS, SQL server,
ASP.net.

An added benefit is that you host your own data, which many enterprises seem
to love.

Show me a web site creation platform that integrates into the MS world like
Sharepoint and I'll show you some rich founders... hint hint

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jcromartie
The business types really love it, and they may have perfectly good reasons,
but it's just terrible for developers. It's proprietary, enormous, and gets in
your way... the last three things a hacker wants to see in software.

Any wiki (I like DocuWiki) will be _worlds_ better for a development team.

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sspencer
Seconding this; the best dev team portal is a wiki. Preferably MediaWiki, but
Trac is all right as well.

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bayareaguy
I left a company that used Trac effectively and joined (for a short time)
another one that used SharePoint. Total suckage. Glad I got out of there.

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babul
How does Trac compare to SharePoint (WSS3)?

I am looking at building a collaboration platform that does a lot of what
Sharepoint offers. Looking at using Trac or WSS3 or something better if anyone
knows of anything.

Thanks.

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bayareaguy
This was about 4 years ago. SharePoint may have improved since then, but the
main thing that I didn't like about it compared to Trac was it forced you into
a single structure which was hard to change, especially if you weren't the
person who originally set it up.

When I joined, a SharePoint structure was already established and filled with
out of date design documents. Unfortunately nobody (other than me) wanted to
it bring up to date because they were already behind schedule getting things
actually working. This in itself is not suprising - unless it's specifically
part of their job, whoever sets up this kind of collaboration software
generally won't to spend the ongoing effort to keep it organized properly and
up to date so rigid structures that look good at the start often end up
looking like dilapidated housing projects from the 1970's.

Part of the reason SharePoint sucked was that it offered no intrinsic editing,
rendering or linking features. All it could really do is offer a place to put
other documents. With Trac or any other wiki, editing and linking pages is
trivial so its less of an ongoing effort to keep up to date. Furthermore
anyone with the time is free generally free to create a separate collections
of pages with whatever organization they want. This means newcomers can easily
create new structures that reflects the current engineering design while
referring back to the old information.

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SwellJoe
If you believe desktop applications have a future, it's obviously a wonderful
innovation. If, on the other hand, you believe that the future of personal
computing is "in the cloud", then it is a crazy boondoggle that tries to
attach obsolete technology to the Internet.

If, like most of us, you think there isn't an absolute truth on either side,
it's probably a relatively effective stopgap measure until Microsoft actually
figures out the Internet. History would indicate that they will figure it out,
eventually, and history indicates that a large segment of the market probably
won't come around until sometime after Microsoft does.

Personally, I think that, in the case of the Internet, Microsoft misunderstood
it for far too long, and they've lost their chance to make the rules
(thankfully--I've been in the in the technology industry long enough to know
that when MS makes the rules, everybody else suffers, including consumers),
but they'll still be able to mark out plenty of territory for themselves.

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justindz
It is the jack of all trades and the master of none, with one exception. It
works very well with ActiveDirectory. Other than that, it will do a mediocre
job at being anything you can dream up: CMS, blog platform, wiki, customer
portal, intranet.

And keep in mind that, in many of those capacities, the tool will live or die
by how effectively it's organized and used and not really on its own technical
merit. The best thing you can do is write down what you want to accomplish and
find something that makes it as hard as possible to not accomplish that. MOSS,
in my opinion, puts up more barriers than it takes down because to the end
user it's not very intuitive, has issues with Firefox, etc.

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Feynman
I come from an "enterprise" environment where all our IT management are goo-
goo over Sharepoint. From my personal standpoint Sharepoint is really quite
lacking in features. Yeah, it has a Wiki -- but it's no comparison to the
likes of say, DokuWiki. Yeah, it has a forum-like portion -- but you could
probably pick any of the top 10 forums available for free on the Net and it'd
be 10x more powerful than what Sharepoint offers. It's also an online file
manager -- with searching and ACLs built-in. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff
here.

To pay for this kind-of stuff when there's far better options online and for
free seems almost ludicrous to me. Not to mention a terrible waste of money.

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r7000
At my large sluggish company everyone thinks it is the bee's knees while I
shudder to use it. But, I do wonder if it is more than I think.

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jasonlbaptiste
see I just cant figure out everything it does. the interface isnt horrible,
its the experience.

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figuerd
my first impression was that it was awful. But on second thought I think my
judgment was a bit clouded, if it was an open source project it would be a
religion.

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msluyter
We use it here at work, and the major problem with it, IMHO, is that its
search functionality sucks. Its search will pull up matches in multiple
versions of a document, and further exacerbating the problem, our company uses
Sharepoint for various Daily Activity Reports. So, if you're unlucky enough to
have a bunch of people entering your search term in their daily activity
report, you'll get tons of useless hits. Of course, you can manually drill
down to a narrower site to search from, but this sort of violates the premise
(ie, you have to already know what you're searching for.)

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s3graham
I've only been a user of it, not an admin, but I loathe the interface so much
that it doesn't matter what else is in there. Shitty version management behind
an awkward-as-hell pile of documents, along with some ass messaging thing I
have no interest in (that's the parts people have tried to tell me were
useful).

It's possible that it's only the "out-of-the-box" interface I hate as I gather
that it's customizable, but that's how I've always seen it, and I don't find
it usable.

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Shadow84
The problem with Sharepoint from my point of view is that it is too slow. The
Document Management Part is very nice but only effectively useable with the
Internet Explrer. So for a MS Shop it can be a very nice tool in smaller
companies or a startup I would use a Multiblog System and/or Wiki to discuss
and as knowledge base.

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dawie
Moss 2007 is better than Sharepoint 2003, but not completely there yet. It has
some flaws and customers often needs to do quite a bit of customization to
satisfy their needs and requirements.

Moss 2007 is a virus, since it ships with some versions of Windows 2003
Server. People just start using it.

Lastly it pays my lunch and bills.

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daveambrose
Short answer: difficult for developers to effecitvely build something
lightweight that runs fast. It's just plain slow. @rman666 said it best
regarding blogs/wikis/bookmarking creation: impossibly slow.

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kogir
In my experience it's a heavy handed solution meant for big problems (like
serious enterprise work with hundreds or thousands of users). While you can do
a lot with it, little is simple or straightforward.

Chances are if you don't immediately see how it'll solve the huge problem
you've been having, it's not for you. Things need to be pretty bad before it
will seem better, but at that point it's great.

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jasonlbaptiste
okay, here's a better question:

should startups use sharepoint? im not saying just the hackers/the dev
process. also for the business side.

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johns
No. It's too generalized. Find something more specific to your needs. You can
make SharePoint into anything, but spend the time building your startup.

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icey
If you're considering MOSS from a startup perspective, I'd stay far away from
it. The licensing for it is expensive, and hiring people to work on it is also
expensive.

Unless you have a full .Net infrastructure and team in place, you could
probably find better alternatives elsewhere.

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ScottWhigham
I think it's interesting but, like others mentioned, a bit overkill for a
small startup.

If anyone is interested in SharePoint online training, check out
<http://www.learnsharepoint.com/>. It's one of our sites.

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abl
I hope Google Sites takes off and kills this ugly beast.

