Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuhsaft | Hacker News Reader

For collaborative documentation, there’s probably a bunch of alternatives.

But SharePoint is the linchpin for Microsoft 365. Well technically SharePoint and Exchange. You can’t use any Microsoft 365 products without SharePoint.

OneDrive uses SharePoint. Outlook Groups and Teams Channels create Microsoft 365 Groups. Every Microsoft 365 Group creates a SharePoint site. Microsoft Loop uses Microsoft SharePoint Embedded.

SharePoint is now a “file and document management system suitable for use in any application”.

So, if you want an alternative to SharePoint you would need an alternative to any M365 Product, including Outlook and OneDrive.

Fun Fact: Teams messages are actually stored via Exchange Mailboxes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/ov...

View on HN

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Is it great? Well, no, but it's incredibly integrated and that has a great appeal to orgs.

Google Docs and Libre Office both produce compatible documents. There's really no reason to force one or the other.

It's just conflating needs. Document editing and file storage are two different tasks. It's weird that people want everything integrated. It's not much effort to just drag and drop a file into G-Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, box.com...

> It's not much effort to just drag and drop a file into … OneDrive …

See, there’s the problem. Once you touch anything M365, you’re using SharePoint.

People see SharePoint as a document collaboration tool. But, in reality, it’s real use is as a data storage platform.

Which is so funny because it was a pain in the ass on prem to make sharepoint work for that purpose. Silly item restrictions, complaints about database sizes (which stored the files), etc

Most of the restrictions have been dropped. You can ignore the database size. Multi-TiB content databases are fine.

But SPO uses Azure Blob Storage to store content rather than SQL databases.

Sure. Just saying when that first was brought up in 2007+ and I had to admin it and people loved their folders and searching and such wouldn’t work because if the view sizes.

...That's a completely different complaint. And also solved long ago.

It was at the time when MS was marketing it as a CMS and file storage hence me saying that’s funny…

What people want are systems that compose and work well together. That's what MS provides, or at least attempts to provide, with SharePoint. When you start trying to tack on collaborative document editors, workflow management systems, shared storage, and other capabilities from different providers or systems you run into more and more complications (especially because most of these don't offer any kind of standards compliance that lets them be used interchangeably). That's also why G-Suite works as a competitor to MS, it covers at least the more critical integrations that people want to work smoothly without needing to combine multiple maybe compatible things together.

> What people want are systems that compose and work well together.

Not really, that's managers' speak. All things SharePoint is just a data swamp.

You think people don't want systems that work well together? That they want isolated apps that don't communicate or work with each other?

> Document editing and file storage are two different tasks.

Not if you want to enable multiple users to be live editing the document at the same time.

I've never been able to properly work on a Word document together with a colleague. Not even once. There's always some kind of bug or sync problem.

Google Docs, on the other hand, works great when you're working together on a document. Too bad they don't have a native client.

> I've never been able to properly work on a Word document together with a colleague. Not even once

Many millions of others seem to do it all the time without issue. I've done it practically every day for many years now and haven't run into sync issues for a long time.

It's not made to sync if two people are trying to open the file off a NAS, it's made for people editing files stored in OneDrive/SharePoint.

But as both examples show, you need to have your document editing and document storage closely working together for multi-user live editing to work. That's something that so far practically only integrated editors/storage platforms offer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com