I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.
Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.
Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another.
Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.
With SharePoint I can share documents and directories with other people in my company.
As much as I think SharePoint is "mediocre", Google Doc is just shit when it comes to sharing[1].
[1] The only sharing google doc does well is sending a link to ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT to a bunch of people by EMAIL ONLY.
Everything there is accessible, visible and searchable (modulo access permissions). It's de-facto shared.
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With a Google Drive, all contents is private, only visible by you, only accessible by yourself.
Other people can't access your stuff, people can't search your stuff, people can't even know what may or may not exist.
If you want to share something, you have to email a link a single specific document of yours to selected people (who will each individually have to accept the invite).
How do you keep track of what is shared? by who? to who? how do you share stuff to groups/teams/businessunit? Basically, google docs intuitively goes against everything you want to do in an entreprisey context.
Yes. That's one of the thing they miss really bad for sharing. It should have been there for 10 years already.
However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.
More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.
https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-p...
the new onedrive client with selective sync is nice if you have something like say a 400mb autocad drawing youd rather not stream everytime you double click it. you can sync just the files in the group/documentlibrary you want.
That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.
AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.
Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)
Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook
Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.
> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"
You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.
What a colossal marketing cockup
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Let-users-add-exter...
"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!
If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....
So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?
>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"
Examples?
"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...
Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable. Win7 is frozen!
You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0 affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!
If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use Chromebooks in the first place.
Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?
OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.
Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.
You're saying that all the other options are worse??
(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)
Sharepoint is the server, Exchange is the server. The Sharepoint server hosts Web OneDrive like the Exchange server hosts OWA Outlook Web Access. If you want to use the desktop client for either, instead of the browser javascript, you can download and install the binary.