Ask YC: Thoughts on MSFT Sharepoint?
Curious what everyone thinks of MSFT sharepoint. What do you think it does exactly? It's pretty vague
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.
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.
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.
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
Any wiki (I like DocuWiki) will be worlds better for a development team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
should startups use sharepoint? im not saying just the hackers/the dev process. also for the business side.
Unless you have a full .Net infrastructure and team in place, you could probably find better alternatives elsewhere.
If anyone is interested in SharePoint online training, check out http://www.learnsharepoint.com/. It's one of our sites.