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Comment by jvehent | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

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Sharepoint. Ugh. The mandated use of Sharepoint completely impeded communication on a multi-institution task I work on -- it was clunky when up, and often not up.

The solution? Instead of the project administering Sharepoint, the admin was handed off to the division of the corporation that specializes in administering Sharepoint. (It's a very large company.) Now we have two-factor authentication and double logins to upload monthly status reports. And still nobody can actually communicate.

SharePoint. Oh my head. When I saw us using that in the future ops center for Fukushima, it was the same feeling I had when I came back from sea duty and there was this thing called PowerPoint: I felt like they were asking me to put my brain in egg slicer. Giving a bunch of Marines with history degrees network and expecting them to understand version control is a step to far. Maybe in ten years. But the interface is sooooo bad, they'll never figure out how to use the one feature the system is intended to provide.

And then a 18 yo REMF downloads all your secret classified documents and uploads them to the Internet.

Due to security policies ordered by a 48 yo REMF.

Is there really an age gap in basic understanding of the Internet? I submit most 18 yo kids know as little as most 48 yo management types. Or 48 yo teachers, or 48 yo anything-other-than-hacker types. If there is any function that filters Internet literacy, it's self selection of certain people (mostly men) into CS/IT.

I'm referring to SIPRNet security policies that gave millions of its users access to the same "Top Secret" data, and where the DoD decision tree strongly correlates to seniority.

I was referring to Private Bradley Manning and Sharepoint. To be fair, it took a few years to crack the MS file encryption. But now the world has wikileaks.

Is sharepoint generally objectionable, or simply unsuited to certain environments/workloads/userbases?

SharePoint dev here. The problem is that Microsoft attempted to build the product to cover every environment/workload/userbase, and as a result fails pretty miserably at all of them.

-You want a CMS? Use SharePoint!

-How about site for delivering BI dashboards? Use SharePoint!

-Large, mostly static public facing site? Use SharePoint!

/Ugh

That's true! I met Microsoft last year at the start of a large project for a client, and we were asking them to recommend a CMS to run in a .NET environment. They DID suggest Sharepoint. I laughed at them - "you are joking" I said. But they insisted, and we had to add Sharepoint to the shortlist of recommended CMS's just so that the client thought we considered everything their Microsoft salespeople were saying. But it was always a joke at that point.

Generally Objectionable. I think it gets packaged with windows server and exchange server for free (or nearly free) which is probably the only reason people use it.

When they do, they are extremely hard to dislodge!

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