Ask HN: Is it me, or is SharePoint needlessly complicated and annoying? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it me, or is SharePoint needlessly complicated and annoying?

All I want to do is create simple text pages and add pictures to them, as well as maintaining a document library. But the amount of options, views, cutomization settings, "hidden" display settings is 10xing the amount of work that should be required.

I upload a file and neither myself nor my team can't see it. I see some text saying that files that are checked out by you are not visible to others. What? How do I check it back in if _I_ can't see it? What were they thinking?

One part of me thinks that it is designed this way so that it necessitates hiring a Sharepoint Developer or SharePoint Admin, which would provide for excellent job security...

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Aren't most microsoft business tools needlessly complex?

Honestly, I think that's just microsoft's way of doing business. They will try to enter a market quickly. They will prioritize a checkbox feature over a feature done "right".

So shipping a feature is more important than shipping a feature correctly done. It might be sort of a good evolutionary strategy.

I think of Teams. Microsoft is just trying to own all of that market. It is adding features all over the place. They're hard to use. There are bugs. There is head-scratching usability.

My companies IT department shut off confluence on short notice and told our teams that they had migrated all the content to sharepont and we could use that going forward.

Five years of organized docs easily searchable turned into a pile of office documents and half functioning “pages”.

This. Anytime I interview, I ensure confluence or hard no. Also Slack will be required for my next role and PagerDuty .

Do you like to be on-duty?

I don't mind it at all. I usually am the one solving the harder issues. Projects are boring, incidents are fun.

Edit: Parent comment above is spot on about their search.

Easily searchable? I thought you said you were using Confluence.

I've had a generally positive experience using the search feature in Confluence. Roughly speaking, how many documents do you think your org has, if you don't mind my asking? Mine probably has an eclectic collection of somewhere between 300-400. We use it for KBs, QRGs, how to's, etc.

The main downside to Confluence I've seen has been more around making it obvious when something is public vs private facing. I had to lock things down a bit to ensure nothing internal was getting out, and have a specific tag I add when I want something visible to the client.

It's also INCREDIBLY frustrating that if I make a numbered list, then want to have a break with a picture or whatever, when I go back to the list, it starts back at 1. I don't always want to use a bullet point, but having the numbers be off makes things very hard to understand at a glance, and basically forces me to set things up in a way that shoves all screenshots or graphics at the very end. I absolutely hate it. It's such a stupid little thing. Just let me put in #.(space) and pick up where I left off!!

TBH I have no idea. I left the company where we were using confluence, but it held the documentation for around 20 teams of developers. The search was always awful for finding anything you didn't have a link to. I vividly remember trying to find a document I knew existed by searching for a phrase in that document tons of results, none of them even close. Ok put it in quotes. Still a mess of results, none of them containing the phrase I was searching for. Looked up the confluence search documentation, turns out they call a string in quotes an exact search, but it's documented to not be. It'll still try to find those terms in proximity each other.

Compared to sharepoint

I used to work with SharePoint professionally (barf), in that we dragged and dropped HTML, JS, and CSS files into a folder that then powered pages on the company's intranet. Luckily we didn't build components using SharePoint's system, but we still had to navigate through the rest of the cruft.

Some of the issues I ran into include (but aren't limited to):

- Files and folders located in counterintuitive locations. Random files that ended up in some locations "just because". After a few years of working that job I knew where certain things were through tribal knowledge.

- Wading through files and documents that were years old. If SharePoint has a system in place that deletes files above a certain age, we didn't have anything like that set up.

- Dealing with a complicated access/security system, that restricted some users from seeing some pages.

- Having to make the intranet pages "work" with IE11. A good chunk of employees preferred using IE11 as their browser of choice so we couldn't not work on compatibility.

- Once, I accidentally moved in-progress HTML and JS files into a prod folder and one of the pages broke in prod. Fortunately it was after hours and I was able to retrieve the original files from GitHub.

- Major performance issues on some of the more data-heavy pages.

- Users not seeing links to docs because they was checked out (like library books), usually by one person with credentials different from everyone else.

That was Job 1 and I'd hoped to never touch SharePoint again. I'm on Job 3 now and I grimaced when I saw that the company used it as its intranet. I'd hate to be on the team responsible for maintenance.

> I'm on Job 3 now and I grimaced when I saw that the company used it as its intranet

Sadly it's Microsoft Teams' backbone, so it's used far and wide still.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/sh...

This was very similar to my experience with the "greater Sharepoint ecosystem".

At one point, maybe still today even, MS was pitching SP as a great environment to build and run custom apps inside of.

I put a lot of time and energy into trying to leverage SP in this way -- the result was extreme disillusion. Underneath the covers, believe me you do not want to "see how the sausage is made."

Around the same time one of the Sharepoint evangelists (or similar) wrote an article explaining that Sharepoint components/features (WIKI for example) were "never intended to be best-in-class or even close to it"

I mean, WTH that kind of statement should not instill confidence in anyone.

I missed a management meeting once and ended up with the sharepoint support team. Yes, you'll need an admin, a developer, a DBA, MS Premier support, and probably some contractors to set it up and keep it working. It's even worse if you try to use the workflow, forms, and process automation features.

> I missed a management meeting once and ended up with the sharepoint support team

So Dilbertesque. My condolences.

This is what annoys me.

>Company wants a technical information library >Oh we have an Intranet >Oh what do you mean we will need dedicated resources to administrate it?

Indeed. dsr said it well here: https://blog.randomstring.org/2017/12/21/a-most-important-jo...

“Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.”

The most-apt (and scathing) bumper-sticker sized slogan I have yet heard about Sharepoint is:

Enterprise Roach-Motel where Office Documents Go To Die a Slow Death

Yeah, it's horrific, and doubly so because they've introduced new ways of doing things over time but a lot of how-to content on the web still tells you to use the old ways.

We moved from XWiki to SharePoint, which theoretically should provide more or less the same functionality, but the mental overhead of SharePoint's weird conceptual model just makes the whole thing impossible.

My job included SharePoint administration and building simple workflows for a few years, I hated it with a passion. It's not just bloated and complicated, the documentation is a cruel joke. Some of their software I actually grew to like - SQL Server first and foremost, but also Visual Studio, and PowerShell - but SharePoint was a Lovecraftian nightmare the last time I had anything to do with it.

And I have to say, I am so glad I am not the only one to see it that way! I feel your pain!

(And yes, I have suspected at times it was a conspiracy to generate lucrative contracts for consultants and trainers.)

My gripe with Sharepoint:

- I don't see hotkey tool tips when I hover over various buttons. When I look up their hotkeys online, they don't work on mac (neither "ctrl" nor "command" keys work in "ctrl + someKey" combinations). I want to be able to indent/unindent, and URL-link text quickly via hotkeys, not click through things.

- Google Drive docs may not be as configurable as Sharepoint sites, but they're much faster for me to work on-- More Hotkeys, Less clicking buttons (including drilling through multiple button dropdown menus-- (Sharepoint URL link button ,lookin at you)).

It was already more than 10 years ago yes. I did a big project in it. Was not impressed. The generated frontend code (inspected on firebug prob?) was completely bloated and had huge amount of code inlined.

The old publishing model you’re referring to is now legacy. You no longer manipulate CSS/HTML/JS directly.

Glad to hear that abomination has been retired, but what about the PTSD that I still have from looking under-the-covers back in the day?

Microsoft doing its part in an international conspiracy to create busywork for the middle class. They don't want you getting too much work done, there isn't enough go around.

They don't want you getting too much work done, you might catch up with them

Sharepoint can be a nice looking, easy to use tool if it's set up properly.

you know where this is going, though. it's usually not set up properly, and it quickly turns into a big confusing mess.

And it generally needs dedicated people to work JUST on Sharepoint to get it in a nice state, and that's generally in addition to any knowledge management type staff you have.

SharePoint admin at current position. Apart from PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and those beasts, I don't find SharePoint too bad to deal with. It's one of those tools that if you use frequently you can navigate through it without too much fuss, but if you're not using it often you will find yourself spending a ridiculous amount of time hunting a specific setting or option that's less-than-obvious to find.

No, you pretty much nailed it. You see, people think of Microsoft as an old company, and I guess by the standards of the Web sector of the greater programming field, it is. But there are older, and MS learned this trick from one of the oldest: IBM.

I spoke to a SharePoint MVP couple of years back who said that the average SharePoint installation has about 100 databases (not tables).

That MVP is either dealing with a VERY large environment or is just flat out wrong (I've never seen a farm with that many databases, and I've worked multi-TB farms).

Trying to do anything on that abomination is like wading through treacle. Slow and unintuitive I can't stand it.

Oh gawd, is it still a thing?!

Not just you Poptart

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