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Comment by killertypo | Hacker News Reader

this makes sense, i work in a pretty convoluted SharePoint environment. It is completely impossible to spin up a development environment without dozens of scripts and knowing exactly what lists to manually create and what data must be present inside of them.

This means that new-hires are handed a cryptic and seriously out-of-date document with instructions on how to setup a proper VM environment.

They check out their code.

They deploy...but wait the deploy fails because of missing data, missing document types, missing lists...

Open up SharePoint, enable some doc types not turned on by default, turn on some more features, add a list. Deploy again, no wait it died again, oh now it's a different doc type and a different feature that the deployment doesn't turn on by default ...etc

The end result is a mess that requires days to get up and running, not hours.

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> i work in a pretty convoluted SharePoint environment

For some reason I intuited that you were not going to talk about how well the organization has dealt with said complexity. I'm curious if there is any way to FFI into sharepoint and start using tools that don't actively sabotage their users.

I'd like to know if anyone has anything nice to say about Sharepoint. As a user I find it miserable in all browsers, and have obviously avoided doing anything with it as a developer.

> I'd like to know if anyone has anything nice to say about Sharepoint.

Its marginally less of a total failure for issue tracking than Excel.

I'm not sure that that counts as something nice.

It's better than staring into the computer as if it were a dark abyss, screaming and longing for a way to build something. It's easy to discount how useful this is for people who really have no tools or means otherwise (not that more specialized services like, without loss of generality, Wufoo, aren't way better). The general discontent has to do (mostly) with 'Sharepoint Engineers', which is a bit like having someone build a house with legos.

I guess a regular wiki is too much to ask for...

(For the omg-cryptic-markup crowd there is always Google Docs. I seriously wonder why that hasn't crushed all trivial Sharepoint instances yet.)

Edward Snowden's last job was a Sharepoint administrator, IRC.

So our answer has to just been to hire more developers, more and more and more developers. As the complexity grows, so does headcount.

This is why I thank the stars that I am the opensource developer, focusing on linux / Python / Django development. I cross over into SharePoint only when we begrudgingly use it as a CMS for a windows 8 app or similar.

There is an effort now to write an external service bus to manage a lot of the business logic complexity that we've baked into SharePoint. With the eventual goal of having SharePoint and other resources leverage this SB and use it instead.

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