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Creating portals with Office Sharepoint

We are dubious about some of the claims made for Enterprise 2.0, the iteration of Web 2.0 social networking technologies that is supposed to turn business into greased lightning. Take dashboards as a small example. The executives cry out for them, the developers build them, and then... entropy. The abandoned wikis, the blogs …

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Anonymous Coward
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Sharepain

Sharepoint is a pile of shite. People use it as a replacement for a network share where they're used to dropping hundreds of excel, word and powerpoint docs. Now they simply embed the damned things in Sharepoint pages, which themselves are hidden away somewhere on the Sharepoint server. Its not easy to find resources in Sharepoint because the data you're looking for is almost always obscured by being hidden inside a document so the search never finds what you're really looking for.

A better solution would be to encourage people to use a real Wiki, and write a proper document to wiki page converter. Thats the only true stopper for take-up. Microsoft reckon they have a word to wiki converter, but it only exists for a specific verison of office vs sharepoint server. A basic word document converter does exist for MediaWiki, but that doesn't deal embedded images in the document.

Jimbo

kinda agree...

we use heavily sharepoint and although I kinda do like it as a user, it is painful for admins to manage it. I agree with @Sharepain comment about network share ... this is really really weak in Sharepoint. I wish they would go more true web route and offer something like google docs. Sharepoint Wiki is still pretty painful.

At the same time, there are not that many easy to use corporate out-of-the-box solutions which cover what sharepoint does. Not saying that sharpoint is the best....

"Its not easy to find resources in Sharepoint because the data you're looking for is almost always obscured by being hidden inside a document so the search never finds what you're really looking for."

this is not true, you can search content of the files as well

Tom Maddox
Gates Horns

IAWTPC

Everything that he said and more. Sharepoint's version control is crap: it's unable to track deltas, instead just making multiple copies of changed files (imagine doing that with Powerpoint or giant Excel spreadsheets!), and it only works for documents, not for actual site content. Also, backing it up reliably is a huge pain in the ass. Sharepoint is an overengineered POS which constitutes a nightmare to deploy and administer; it may be acceptable for users, but there are plenty of solutions which do almost as much for substantially less time, effort, pain, and money.

Anonymous Coward
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And yet...

...people bash Lotus Notes, even though it's been doing all this and more since the early nineties. What's going on here - massive bleeding in the collective brain or someting?

Cris E
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SP was not designed, it grew.

Sharepoint was never designed as a single package. It grew organically into this giant sabre-toothed platypus that might be fun to look at but is absolute hell on zookeepers. Portals, sure we got portals. Here, let me hang a search on the side here. Oh, and reporting, that can go here. Look, another Search engine! Hey, this is fun! Ooh, shrapnel from the PerformancePoint crash. That can go over here...

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