SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go.
Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta, and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)
PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."
Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, and SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old project documentation completely going away, OMFG].
PMs: "We don't care."
Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring script to copy the things to SharePoint]
PMs: "Stop that."
Devs: "We don't care."
The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.
I wonder if SharePoint has a future in Microsoft's strategy re-alignment.
SharePoint (evolved as Office Server) is a beast of software and many awkward engineering & design choices from the 2003 era are still visible to the end user. And I am not even touching the XHTML tabled based layout with thousands of CSS rules, Silverlight & ActiveX controls, bad WebDAV support, "SharePoint Groups", low soft & hard limits for file size, file count in folders, etc.
It has of course also it good values for companies. Like the Office integration, the Office ribbon UI and some document management options that are missing from Windows Explorer thanks to the failed attempt to release WinFS in the Longhorn era.
Microsoft also discontinued InfoPath, the WYSIWYG form designer that is part of Office 2003-2013 and the InfoPath form services hosted on top of SharePoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_InfoPath
Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?
I suspect the curse of backwards compatibility might cause a problem - there are so many systems that have dependencies on SharePoint (including a lot of Microsoft's own products). I found this page the other day which talks about the non-trivial process of picking the right API for talking to SharePoint:
The diagram trying to explain how the different APIs relate is a pretty good visualization of the problems that anyone trying to refactor SharePoint would face.
It is widely known that 2013 will be the last version of SharePoint. Everything will be an incremental upgrade from now on with customisations decoupled from SharePoint through 'Apps' working off web services.
At SharePoint Conference 2014 the product team specifically announced that there will be a SharePoint vNext released on-premises, released in the summer of 2015, presumably to be named SharePoint 2016.
Apps are being pushed hard for all customizations so as to decouple code from the "core" of SharePoint so as to allow for a better upgrade strategy.
That being said, I do see Yammer as replacing a lot of functionality within SharePoint over the next 2-3 years, but I believe SharePoint as a product (especially as it relates to document management and search) will continue to exist for at least another 4-5 years.
>> Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?
It would be better to build something on top of Outlook and Onenote. New file systems will only be useful if the metadata survives email which would require email integration anyway.
You'll be pleased to know that the work item side of Team Foundation appears to be based on SharePoint and they're heavily marketing that at the moment.
I work in a drawing office at engineering firm that uses Sharepoint. I wish I could even get anyone to acknowledge that there are such things as versions of files. Our backups are destroyed after 72 hours "to save space", emails are copied manually from Outlook to "emails sent" and "emails received" folders in sharepoint.
The cluelessness and lack of interest from either the IT dept. or anyone really drives me crazy. I just get shoulder shrugs from colleagues when I tell them magical tales from the distant lands of version control.
There's may be a case for pushing hard but I'm leaving in September.
Sorry to reply to myself but I have worked in a couple of places now as a CAD operator rather than a Devops. I am appalled at how terrible the IT depts. have been at getting involved at adding value to the business. They seem quite happy to sit back and wait to be asked to do things the managers have read about somewhere.
At the current place the only time I even see anyone from IT is when something needs fixing. I can see multiple vectors for real process improvement.
And I think this will be a feature of many IT depts. If you want to make a positive contribution and be known for making a difference rather than being regarded as some sort of Janitor then you need to get out of your chair and, as Taichi Ohno says: walk the gemba. The gemba is the shop floor where things happen and the place where making a difference is something your customers are willing to pay for. Don't be an IT anchor, ramping up equipment costs to stay in place.
Ha you haven't seen the piece of shit that is HP/CoCreate WorkManager then. Not joking but sharepoint is Jesus' sandals compared to that turd. SharePoint is also at very least 20 times cheaper because you don't need a full $1m stack HPUX pile and Oracle to run it.
To an experienced software developer, any document management system is going to feel like a poor excuse for a source code control system. But many businesses live and breathe by their documents and workflows the way development teams do their source code.
It sounds like most of your complaints are about the way the processes were managed rather than SharePoint itself.
If you think Sharepoint is garbage today, you should have tried it in '08-'09. I was at a 100% Linux site where management insisted on everyone using Sharepoint and scrapping out old Wiki and source control systems. The rationale seemed to be entirely because Unix admins cost more. We couldn't even browse Sharepoint from our own machines since it was so broken in non-MS browsers that they had to set up VNC to a Windows box. Most people couldn't install Wine either because IT refused to give local root to anyone. The only way to install your own tools as local root was to violate every security principle by bringing your own box and swearing off any kind of support.
I notice that management in most companies has a bad habit of believing IT will put up with awful tools just because admin staff do.
> a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents
"I resemble that remark". Shudder.
Such fun, a web implementation of a 1980s folder system, with no possible way of doing an "ls -lr". One gets to click every node in a three or four deep hierarchy to look for a document. Shudder, erase from memory.
When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,
Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.
Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good luck finding anything. Sheesh.
And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.
Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots, and we never lost anything. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used anymore and got recycled. Wow.
Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid, slow and unreliable in practice.
I have seen SharePoint installations at big corporations and they are horrible.
In one case there was a central SharePoint group that has commissioned the sites. So we had a highly restricted, utterly gutted and badly corporate styled thing that was practically useless.
Add to that that there was a weird mix of public and enterprise editions (which cost a bunch of money and were frowned upon by the org unit).
In this environment you can sit back and watch productivity and common sense being choked to death. Enterprise is a weird place.
Not sure what version of SharePoint you were using, but recent versions most definitely obey access rules - if you don't have access to a document, you don't see it in the search results.
No share point does not store history. Get a file above a certain size, and that magically just stops working.
Every time I've seen share point used, everyone described it the same way. Its where documents go to die.
So far at the current gig a share point "upgrade" has meant that all our fun use of the old install is useless. All of the sudden wikis look more useful.
Burn me once and all that. Oh and search, yeah that search is about as useful as altavista was back in the day.
Sharepoint has every possible feature, in the sense it exists on a product information sheet. But every possible feature is implemented in such a terrible way that actually using it is more trouble than just about any alternative, including the "rename file to include version number and then email it around" method.
I think he's referring to when they made sure that "plays for sure" drm license/authentication/whatever servers got shut down so all the music you bought became a bunch of bits in a bucket.
Yes, the shutdown is what I was referring to, as you correctly inferred. Technically it may have all worked but when they pulled the plug on the servers, the value of any previous marketing assurances became clear.
Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.
If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it. Would you allow a dev to just start using Git with no training at your company? Would you cut the dev any slack if he complained about Git without bothering to learn how to use it first?
> If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it.
By all means. How do they know when they're done learning it? It's by definition difficult to tell the difference between missing functionality and hard-to-discover functionality.
Your comment is witty, but I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files. It's not even about Microsoft or the effects of any of their choices or policies - it's about stupid managers.
> ... I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files
The article is about Onedrive for Business. Which is nothing more than a Sharepoint Document Library in the users MySite. And that is probably also the cause of the behaviour that the autor is describing: there's probably some workflow or other weird SharePoint feature at work, that was installed or activated unknowingly.
Well, that. Also about how bad SharePoint is, and the kind of people who think that it's okay, when it's not. I wouldn't put my data there because the types of things you run into on SP are endemic and fractally bad.
"I wouldn't put my data there because the types of things you run into on SP are endemic and fractally bad."
Yes, there is nothing good about SP. But have you tried version controlling office files? That's easy right, just save as office xml and push. Oh wait, what is all this? User state in the xml file? Currently active spread sheet tab? Currently selected cell? Nightmare!
My previous employer was switching from just using shared folders and manual versioning (which worked, was accessible, and we had great search tools for it) to sharepoint. Despite almost the entire development floor complaining and objecting to management, their was no changing their mind. My guess is that some higher level exec had a great lunch with some MS salesman.
The result was that next week, people were setting up ad-hoc fileservers and documentation systems to avoid using sharepoint, with half-baked sync scripts to placate management.
I am sorry you had a bad experience with your PMs, but what does SharePoint have to do with creating categories that don't match anything in the product, or with deleting databases prematurely? Search in internal databases is a very hard problem because of lack of metadata, and in my experience it is not solved any better in source control systems than it is in SharePoint.
And, I have personally found SkyDrive Pro, or OneDrive for Business, or Groove, or SharePoint, or whatever MS wants to call it, very convenient and reliable compared to Google Drive (for which the desktop app tends to quit every hour and leave things un-synced, and which has far worse web viewers).
Anyone who seriously tries to make a company adopt Sharepoint should be fired on the spot, be it the IT guy, the CIO, the CEO or the chairman of the board. There is no possible excuse for that kind of stupidity.
I've got some experience in the field as a consultant for a similar product called Alfresco, and I can see why it is such a big success. If there is anything that is much better, I haven't seen it yet.
So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.
For me that would suffice - but its not the answer, I'm afraid. Management/IT wants to:
- have workflows, so documents can be approved among other stuff
- have document lifecycle, so they expire and must be reviewed after time x
- solve the Dropbox problem - how do you collaborate with external entities without compromising security by having users uncontrollably put stuff on Dropbox, because there is no other way?
- have automatic versioning
- be able to checkout/lock a file during editing
These are just a few aspects. You can do most if this by gluing stuff together yourself, but these are the constraints:
- be able to achieve all this with semi-competent IT staff
- seamless integration into the existing Windows infrastructure is a big plus
- be able to blame someone else if something goes wrong
The problem with the semi-competent IT staff is that they are not immune to Microsoft's BS^H^H PR. They will really believe what the account manager told the CIO over dinner.
I hear good things about Alfresco. I have a lot of experience with Plone, which is also a very good foundation for a corporate intranet. I've deployed it countless times in this scenario, as well as the back-end of public-facing websites.
I took me a while to realise it but yes you are 100% right.
A few years ago I played with SharePoint for a bit and found some good use cases for it. Decided I'd throw some code together that I could wire into it and sell. There was a demand and SharePoint object model was pretty spot on.
4 days later I hadn't even got a bearable working SharePoint installation for doing dev against, had to throw another 4gb of ram at the machine I was working on and wanted to kick the shit out of the thing due to the recursive layers of batshit.
14 days later I had learned python, written the entire thing from scratch using django and had gone live with a client who still uses it today.
I did a lot of development on Plone and Zope. Mind you, Plone is not the easiest CMS platform to work with or to program for (you will regret using it at some point in time, but it will pass), but it used to be a great starting point for an office intranet. I am not sure how well it fits that use case now, but it's one of my preferred CMSs.
Yeah, them stupid people over at Volvo, the Department of Defense, the marines, the army - all of them are clearly idiots! Everybody should just use git repos and use javascript webapps!
So your PM doesn't manage the docs? as in talk to you about what the appropriate output should be and then they collect and handle the organization of it?
There are a few PM's out there like that, but most I have worked with are super excited about jira or sharepoint, love agile (as in "look at all the charts, the customer will be so happy when I show these to him") and asks nothing of his team except to follow his guidelines and everything will be swell. Are all unmindful IT people working with MS and MS-centric customers these days, or do you have them on the other side of the fence too?
Your reply infuriates me. The PM, at a minimum, should be collecting the information needed to credit the appropriate team/ICs, circulate status of dependencies, and communicate upwards. Methodology(agile) and tools (SP/Jira) are supposed to be ways to think and optimize communications...
It really peeves me to see PMs get away with doing spreadsheet management and wear teflon suits...
To be fair, i've been on a team where the engineers passed the buck towards me also, so i had to push towards written follow ups and detailed documents but that was isolated from the entire team..
Framework filled resumes go straight to the trash or get tossed a cluster f* in an interview to see how they structure the problem and build out a path towards a more productive structure.. most have failed because they all respond with some rendition of 'call a meeting with the team and their supervisor'..
Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta, and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)
PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."
Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, and SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old project documentation completely going away, OMFG].
PMs: "We don't care."
Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring script to copy the things to SharePoint]
PMs: "Stop that."
Devs: "We don't care."
The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.