Does SharePoint destroy intranet design? (2010)
nngroup.com
nngroup.com
First, if you do not have a "webmaster" (a person who has authority to delete things, to tell people to "knock that shit off," and whose job it is to regularly patrol this content), you can and will end up with an endless mess of duplicates, partially-constructed sites, Potempkin villages where a traveler might foolishly expect content, and swollen archives of irrelevant data jammed in as a backup.
Second, people invariably notice workflows and they have the brilliant idea that they can attempt to automate a lot of paper-pushing. This is almost true, and only becomes completely true if they hire someone who is a Sharepoint admin, with real chops. Now, administration will not want to invest in another FTE, so they will instead attempt to hire someone who is half a Sharepoint admin, and half something else, usually whatever their current needs are. This is akin to laying out job listings for part-time brain surgeons who are also world-class detectives when they're not playing musical venues; Buckaroo Banzai never answers this particular call, and you get left with some clunky, badly-implemented workflows.
Third, you must have someone else responsible for hosting, backup, and upgrade of Sharepoint. You're not doing upgrades often enough for you to be good at it. Similarly, backups and restores ought to be left to the people who are into that kind of thing. See #2.
Fourth, as much as you would like a clean separation between intranet and extranet, you will invariably get "requests" from Important People that such and such from some other organization have access and can collaborate with some of your other internal intranet users (which ought to be redundant but now is not). You must recognize this from the beginning and plan accordingly.
You can turn off file handling all together in teams, which it sounds like you should have done.
End of the day, SharePoint is cheaper than a file server as you get a file solution a MVP discovery solution, and a MVP workflow engine that is good enough to get started, but lousy enough to sell Dynamics or PowerWhatever.
What I wonder is what alternatives are out there, open source or otherwise which are similarly flexible? Airtable seems similar for some situations but opinionated. FileMaker feels pretty niche and quite expensive to host. What draws me to Sharepoint Lists is that it feels like a backend and fronted at the same time, so it’s easy to experiment with near instant feedback.
Compare it to airtable as far as usability.
I’d rather just store data untyped in json and use it with anything.
Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
PowerPoint and even word works pretty well. But data sucks on SharePoint.
While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.
Potential commercial solution: https://www.synchronizer-for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/
This sort of integration isn’t impossible to DIY but it will take a lot of effort to make the first such integration. I’m going to say right away though many processes I’ve seen involving excel spreadsheets and SharePoint are inane managerisms which should never be automated and instead should be purged with fire. LOTS of fire.
The dumbed down version is to use the "edit in grid view" feature of lists, which happens to make copy/pasting cells and rows between Sharepoint and Excel easy. I've done this before to make bulk changes when any additional effort isn't worth it.
I've done what you have done and demonstrated the pasting into grid view. But this requires a perfect placement of the cursor and also the slow as f*ck row-by-row validation+commit to the database is outright comedic.
“Hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?”
“It’s in Numbersv4Final.xlsx “
“So what’s in Numbersv4Final2.xlsx?”
“I think that’s the version Jane was working on.
“I see a Numbersv4Final_Jane.xlsx “, is that based on Final or Final2?”
“Ask Jane?”
“Jane quit last week. She said she if she was going to work in a circus it might as well be a literal one.”
“Here’s the link to the excel with those numbers.”
“Thanks Bob, you’re the best.”
OneDrive has versioning. Renaming excel files is for noobs.
(Btw, I don’t like Excel, I’d rather put data small enough to fit in excel in git, but I like Excel better than SharePoint)
Please don’t. You’re replacing a gunshot wound with stage 4 brain cancer. Outlook is one of the few things that is a worse filesystem than SharePoint.
Use a SMB share or something please just stop the attachment madness.
Use Dropbox or something if you’re a renegade.
I'd love to see a comparison with Notion databases as that seems to me to be the UX hallmark of user accessible relational database functionality.
Edit: noticed this is already discussed in another reply here.
I was at Microsoft in the group called MCS which stood for Microsoft Consulting Services during the 3rd release of Sharepoint, the one that finally found market fit and was abbreviated MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services) and we joked that M in MCS stood for MOSS because it sold like crazy and many of us in the field had crazy busy times supporting major implementations.
I was amazing at SharePoint, but I am very, very happy that I moved on and hopefully will never have to touch it again. It is an amazingly extensible product that was very often a victim of that exact extensibility.
I saw an intranet at Cisco that was build on some monstrous IBM software and it was impossible to navigate. And I saw Confluence based intranets that are quite nice. You get what you put into it. If you build a nice knowledge hierarchy and have librarians/content owners, you'll get a fine intranet regardless of software. If you don't, you won't.
Was it Lotus Notes by any chance?
BRRR. I am just getting grossed out thinking about it now.
It's fundamental ideas are great, but building anything with it becomes a nightmare of xml and non standard tooling with confusing lingo.
Personal folders on a network drive -> OneDrive
Shared folders on a network drive -> SharePoint sites
In-person meetings -> Teams video meetings
Desk phone calls -> Teams calls
1 billion one-line emails -> Teams chat
With a few exceptions we don’t much use the “Teams” part of Teams. It was clearly modeled after Facebook-style “wall posts” with comments, and, well, no one uses Facebook anymore either.
I cannot even tell you what we use it for anymore, other than storing certain files that should really not be stored there but are for legacy reasons. Anything I personally had to use it for has since been merged into our internally developed system to much rejoicing.
It would be as sensible to ask, "Do CMSs Destroy Internet Design?" If you're building a custom CMS for your company intranet instead of using SharePoint, a wiki, Notion or whatever, you're doing it wrong.
Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences...
A small usability lapse: no publication date on the page, or in the report (presumably intentional). The report states:
"The research for this report was done in 2013, but the majority of the advice may still be applicable today, because people and principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does."
I've survived by maintaining a well-organized bookmarks folder. I'm never the person holding up a meeting while trying to find that important document in some SharePoint maze.