Ask HN: What The Hell Does Sharepoint Do?
It's Microsoft's fastest growing product and tons of people use it, but it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain. What exactly would you say it does?
Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it, it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users.
Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned.
Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously.
Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a little bit before you can start customizing the portal.
Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer.
If you have further questions, ask away.
Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better (office integration is obviously much better on SP). Also you can get pretty impressive Confluence/Sharepoint integration.
Also if you're already using Domino platform in house - you could go the Lotus Connections + Quickr way - getting full Open Office (Symphony) integration.
Both these solutions being much cheaper AND more extensible than SharePoint. Plus collaboration capabilities of Atlassian or IBM solutions being much better than SP's
Don't get me wrong - I believe that SP is pretty good - just not for an IT company with tech savvy users - it would be probably better to look somewhere else.
Much better according to you. Not according to the hordes of non-geeks in large corporations, who don't even know that there are alternatives.
Compared to sharing a spreadsheet by email or via a shared drive with no locking, Sharepoint is pretty good!
We do have SP in our company, we also have lots of other stuff - we use JIRA for issue tracking for example. I also spent quite some time evaluating Confluence. And what I figured out was that getting to integrate whole of our infrastructure and different existing document repositories (they're all over the place technologically and physically) would be way easier and more flexible using Atlassian suite.
That's because we work on so many different platforms (.Net, Domino, Java, Oracle, MSSQL,...). And since SP is very typical of MS software (great integration with anything MS - and other stuff does not exist) - for our situation an principal/technology agnostic system is much much better in the long run.
But as far as non-geeks go in monolythic MS stack companies - ofcourse SP is AWESOME :)
Second, what about extensibility? Does Atlassian provide a way to customize the installation?
As far as extenisbility goes... There are loads of plugins available for free. Giving you an ability to extend your Wiki with social oriented features, different UI customisations, you get remote API, you can add widgets (they are going to make the Shindig an integral part of Confluence) or embed whole pages.
If you want to pay a reasonable price you can buy payable plugins: Gliffy, Sharepoint Connector, Balsamiq,...
Did I mention that Atlassian products stack together super nicely (being able to view your JIRA issues on documentation pages in wiki is superb).
Using the stack mentioned above will basically give you all the tools you need for all your documentation creation and collaboration needs costing you about 10.000$ for a 500 man company.
From what I've seen so far it's the Atlassian that are driving the whole WEB 2.0 Enterprise collaboration game - with IBM and MS trying to follow - but Atlassian is just too fast so far IMHO.
And I don't even work for Atlassian :)
For 10$ each you can get: JIRA (issue tracker), Confluence (wiki & collaboration platform), GreenHopper (Agile tools), Bamboo (Continuous integration), FishEye (Adding UI and functionality to: SVN, CVS, Perforce, Git) and Crowd (user management)
So if you're a sub 10 man company (or need only as many licenses) you can hardly beat that for 60$ a year :).
http://www.atlassian.com/starter/
Disclaimer: I am NOT working for Atlassian and I am NOT affiliated to them in any way - I am not even an customer (because our pointy haired bosses don't trust anything that doesn't cost an arm and an leg and isn't sold to them by sleazy MS or IBM salespeople).
Certainly when I was using it I found it an utter pain and persistently had problems with documents being in the wrong state.
I don't have access to a sharepoint installation anymore or I'd look for a closer idea of what I found difficult.
Why not own up to your reasons for asking the question?
What is the benefit/value prop to a normal everyday person and why would they use it/love it?
But I would leave out the "love it" part.
Normal everyday people don't get much direct benefit from it, although they do benefit indirectly:
* They don't have to implement business processes by "mailing form 3021-C to Clara in Purchasing"
* It sets a lowest common denominator for bizapps that is better than what enterprises get from bespoke .NET and J2EE dev.
Every enterprise uses MS Office? I don't think so.
I think we're on the same page though: Simplicity is key.
Drupal is the best...
If you're into Drupal, check out our initial case study on the development. We've put together some interesting innovation for the platform.
It also sucks.
It sucks like Microsoft products used to suck, back when Microsoft was evil, not just irrelevant.
Did you ever use Windows 3.1? It's roughly that level of quality - crashes frequently, is difficult to navigate and relies on people begging others to do things that should be easy ("can you upload this document because I can't find the correct place").
As a specific example, one of the primary use-cases for it involves a person uploading a word document, and then other finding it. The problems with uploading are numerous, but we'll ignore them for the moment (sufficient to say that depending on which version of Word you have you may or may not be able to save directly to the Sharepoint repository, and of course it might crash while saving, losing anything you have done). The real problem is the search - by default it only searches on office metadata, so finding "Template for xxx" is no problem, but unless everyone correctly sets up their metadata you can never find the documents. Apparently it can be reconfigured to index content as well, but at in the first place I came across it I found it more effective to build my own search index by crawling the webdav directly structure (That was in Java, with NTLM authentication, extracting text from MS office document - so that shows how "easy" it was). The company used that index for years, because Sharepoint was so sucky.
Sharepoint sucks - I hope Google Wave kills it, but if you are doing a start up aimed at it please, please, please succeed!
This is not like using BaseCamp, guys. These huge featurefests from Microsoft are complex animals and require training and work to get right.
Use a hosted box and let somebody else worry about all of that.
Yes, that was precisely his/her critique -- and mine.
(And I didn't have admin rights, so I did what I could to work around the problems)
So I built a search index.
Which worked better than the Sharepoint version (This was Sharepoint 2001, and I don't think that supported full text).
Incidentally, the company I was at was a MS Solution Provider (tm), so they did have some expertise in installing software.
My view is that any software which has defaults as bad as this sucks.
(And I didn't have admin rights, so I did what I could to work around the problems)
If the problem was not the installability then you fail to mention the antecedent to "the problems" in your post. I think it was a reasonable conclusion from what you wrote that you were "installing software and had problems because of permissions".
I wasn't saying you were wrong to install it, some corporate environments require workarounds themselves!
Sharepoint is only really utilised because it comes as part of Microsoft's enterprise package. More often than not it is recommended/purchased by the IT department solely, without any other input from management. Large companies can expect massive seat-based licensing costs in the millions, year long implementation timelines and poor uptake rates. I will probably get downvoted but I speak the truth. People should be fired for their choice.
Actually the opposite is true with most corporate software. That's why it's so bad.
More controversially, SP also seems to be replacing MS Access as the non-IT-sanctioned application platform of choice. Instead of creating Access databases on a file share, people use SP "lists" to store data. The controversy stems from the fact that these lists often outgrow the practical limits of SP and need to be migrated to "real" systems.
Many people also seem to want to use SP as a Content Management System or even as the preferred application development platform (in which all application functionality is delivered as SP "web parts", which plug in to SP pages). These uses seem to cause as many problems as they solve, but that's just my opinion.
This seems like a better situation than with Access though; at least the Sharepoint list apps are all located within one system; not as discrete files that may be scattered across laptops, desktops, email accounts and server shares, with who knows how many versions.
It's the "non-sanctioned" aspect that tends to cause issues down the line, not moving to SharePoint from MS Access. I could've been more clear in that section of my comment.
Think of it as a document posting, storage, and workflow system, where documents can be plan text or html, or any kind of office doc.
So, for instance, you can easily set up a web form for people to fill out to get a service, then set up the routing for that form to get approved, checked, and added into the corp database.
Or a doc could be a blog, with threaded comments. Or a catalog system, with ordering and inventory.
It does everything. SharePoint is love.
That's exactly why it sucks balls.
People have different theories of software. There's 37 Signals and then there's Microsoft's.
I'm not a huge fan, but I acknowledge that it does a lot. It's Microsoft's server strategy for the next decade or so, most likely: a place where office docs can live and move around in automated business processes. That means it has a learning curve -- a learning curve that most users will never climb. Which means yes, it's going to suck for a lot of people.
As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in theory, but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like it or not, based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score better than those without.
I don't especially like this situation, but there it is. Simply complaining about it is not going to make it go away.
That is, in itself, a very interesting observation. Reminds me of PG's talk on Viaweb and the use-case for their template language: "users always want an upgrade path, even though as a rule they'll never take it."
I believe it also includes document repositories, collaboration, and syncing, and is tightly integrated with the Office suite.
Its clunkly and Microsoftish to be sure, but its here, it works, and its been deployed across many huge organizations. Implementing a knowledge portal is often a culture and process problem more than a software problem, and its here that Microsoft has excelled with Sharepoint.
Its easy to write off to be sure, being made by MS and decidely "1.0", but this is the big brand alternative to collaboration tools like Dropbox, Etherpad, and yes, Google Wave.
I was just mentioning to someone that over the last couple of years a lot of the government sector jobs that used to read "ASP.NET/C#" now say "SharePoint." I'm assuming COTS is being mandated as a cost-saving measure.
Makes me remember when I was young and windows 3.11 for workgroups was the sh*t ;)
It's like describing .NET before it was released. WTH is it? Here's a theorem I'd like to posit. If you can't clearly describe a MS product, I'd say that it's something to stay away from, for those of you that run your own businesses and can make those decisions.
As to why they don't look to free alternatives, in MS enterprise shops, that question never comes up.
Finally, it makes it pretty hard to move away from MS if you have your whole corporate consciousness embedded in sharepoint.
I had a small team that needed to share documents related to a consulting project. Everybody needed to use MS products, access it from the web, be able to check-in/check-out files, have a common calendar, a team blog, and a quick wiki for client-related information.
Sharepoint did all of that, in an integrated fashion, right out of the box. We got it hosted for about 30 bucks a month.
In addition, everything is an RSS feed. So as people change things on a thread you're watching, you can catch it right in your RSS reader.
If you have a few offices or remote users it is really useful. Probably not even worth considering for less than 15 people and only if you have some existing infrastructure. For smaller teams a hosted solution or some of the other products mentioned might be a better fit. (123together.com and intermedia both are OK for hosted SharePoint/exchange etc) Also, the blog and wiki stuff is still sub-par but the check-in check out stuff for documents does work pretty well.
I hate to come off like a fanboy, but I understand what Microsoft is trying to do with SharePoint and it makes sense to me.
I had another team that was just 2 or 3 guys working on a startup. We used basecamp and were very happy with it.
It depends on what you want and what your skill level is. If you're highly distributed and do a lot with Microsoft documents, then MOSS is a logical choice (and not extremely expensive). If you're just a couple of guys kicking around some code? Hack something together or use one of the simpler tools available on the web.
I'd draw the line somewhere around 4 or 5 guys, not 15 -- if you're doing something that's document-heavy. If it's just programming? I wouldn't consider it until I reached the 8-10 person team size, at least.
What part of that do people not understand?
Seems like you already have some sort of point or answer you're trying to get to. Perhaps it is "Microsoft sux and hackers can replace SharePoint!"
If so, then get to it. That Billion-dollar market awaits you.
But for everything else that it claims to be is just a huge tease.
- It can be a CMS, but it's the worst, most inflexible, non-standard compliant one you can imagine.
- It can be a development platform for corporate applications. But unless you're doing something that is ultra-simple and very close to out-of-the-box, it's just not worth your time. Plus the whole development process is one big hack (need Windows server, SharePoint, IDE on the same machine, position every object manually, batch job here, keygen there, restart SP/IIS all over the place, etc)
- Business users are able to create small business apps and workflows - but they'll be a complete mess and everyone will become frustrated with the bugs, limitations and idiosyncrasies when using them.
- You can do workflows - but the out-of-the-box workflows suck, SPD workflows have way too many limitations and custom workflows are a big pain and alot of work.
- It is enterprise-y... but it has lots of non-enterprise "features". Deleting your workflow history after 3 months, updating everything single document with the latest datestamp when doing a service pack, broken import/export features.
It seems less pejorative somehow, maybe because in its case the emphasis is on the web, not Access.
All that's missing is 280North's Atlas.
Also, as someone who has to maintain such a thing, Access is a mediocre interface for putting frontends on databases.
Yeah, there's lots more you can do... but as a consumer friendly semi-structured data repository on the intranet or internet it is pretty damn good.
* The search was unusuably bad. One of the worst searches I've ever used.
* The document versioning may, if you're a programmer, lead you to believe it works like source control. Then you delete a document and find there's no way to retrieve it short of reinstalling an entire sharepoint backup to a spare machine and extracting just the file you were interested in.
And another nice opportunity for lock-in to ms-centric document formats.
From a users perspective I see SP as no more than the "My Documents" folder moved to a browser. Sure, documents are now accessible to others, but SP does not solve the problem of explaining what the status of the document is. So you find someone else's doc, but you still may have to call or email to figure out if the doc was sent to customers, accepted, etc. As a document management platform, SP brings nothing new to the table.
Company functions like internal IT support, HR, etc. can easily setup simple workflows, and ticketing systems. In my opinion, this is the single best thing of SP and super valuable.
As a tech guy, I would never choose SP. First of all I find it too expensive, and second, the lock-in pitfalls of expensive upgrades and hours and hours of consulting to develop simple changes are just too risky (if it was my money).
So I agree with others in these comments, SP tries to do too much (and even more in the 2010 version), and the IE only thing just pisses me off. (you can actually use other browsers, but I found that some of the config stuff can only be done in IE)
I'm currently analyzing the possibility of implementing SharePoint at work (small office, 5 people counting myself) but do dislike the fact it would only enhance format lock-in. Walking away from Microsoft products is not a possibility since pretty much every single document we come across is created on Microsoft software, except for PDF documents; what I would like is increase workgroup capabilities, regardless of document format.
So, what would be a decent alternative to it? I've seen most PHP-based systems and have always been left wanting.
Hell, I'm having a hard time getting him to move away from Yahoo Mail to Google Apps as it is.
There are lots of hosted Sharepoint solutions you can find that aren't very expensive. They handle the backups, hotfixes, versioning, and such, and you guys just worry about your business.
That's much easier than trying to glue together several other services from separate providers, in my opinion. I'm not a MS fanboy, but Sharepoint does seem to be a logical progression from Office to something more web-centric.
The most use I've gotten out of it so far is for document management and document peer reviews. It IS convenient for editing Office 2007 documents if you're on Windows using IE. You can just checkout files through the browser. This feature does not work for Firefox.
One big problem we have is that the VPN breaks Sharepoint links so that the links that the people on the inside pass around break for those of us using VPN. That's not necessarily a Sharepoint issue, but it is annoying nonetheless as it does not have pretty URLs.
Something's not right.
It's Microsoft's answer to your business problems like 'how can my team have internal blogs?' and 'we need document versioning' and 'we pass documents around by email to get approval and steps get missed' and 'how can we computerise these simple form based procedures?'
Sharepoint doesn't easily let you create free-form context and structure for content. TWiki takes a minimalist approach that's very easy to use.
Stay far away if you dont know MS products. I deal with it now, im not an MS person, its rough.
This is a market ripe for disruption though, because when developers and HNers realize something sucks, then corporate IT will eventually too, 5 years down the line. The question is where the disruption will come from. Some people bet on Wave, myself excluded.
posterous:blogging :: ???:sharepoint
But I might be biased...
Non-technical people don't seem to get to the step of generalising what they know about using computers, i.e. Word->word processor and Excel->spreadsheet, so going to something new like Google docs isn't like "oh this is an online word processor like Word" but instead go "this isn't Word OH MY GOD WHAT DO I DO?"
If something could map say a "My Google Docs" folder under My Documents it would be the same; so you can just go into Word and open a file up for editing.
Personally I'd rather just open my browser, but hey I've used several word processors as well :P
You can hardly move on the Internet for 'simple' collaboration websites.
Point to one that also integrates with Active Directory and is backed by SQL Server and hooks document libraries into Outlook and
The best definition is that it's "an intranet in a box"