Found this article from a Microsoft SharePoint hater. Not really saying anything intelligent, or constructive criticism, or even offering an alternative product or work-around. Just simply saying “it’s crap“.
There are more and more posts and articles these days, with lots of developers & designers suffering a lot of pain with regard to the HTML that is produced from SharePoint – master pages, accessibility and so on.
Web standards and accessibility *IS* an issue – I concede that point (from personal experience). Microsoft do need to look into that.
But – within a corporate environment, it’s often less of an issue to be “cross browser” compliant and so on. Most organisations will have a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) – such as a specific version of Internet Explorer – and (most likely) will have other Microsoft desktop products – including Outlook, Word, InfoPath, Excel and so on.
Statements like this are kinda non-intelligent :
…what I’m trying to say is that Sharepoint 2007, is beyond repair when it comes to interface customization, and you should do everything in your power to avoid working with it.
That’s a bit of a “perfect world” view, and sometimes there are compromises to be made, to implement a wealth of other functionality and features.
And – here’s another gem :
…it’s also a frickin’ documentary on poor development, a handbook in working your ass off to deliver the worst code possible.
To release something like MOSS in these days and age, and, no less, target it to multi-billion dollar companies, is such a joke.
Why wouldn’t a large, usually international, company care about quality?
They really should rename it to MOCKERY instead.
The developers who built this shouldn’t have to fix it or get a scolding.
They should be without jobs.
Ummm, OK – whatever, dude. I’ll let Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer know.
Sharepoint 2007 very, very hard to customize (from this article)
Um – not really – in fact, it’s probably the opposite. You can customize it sooo much, that’s it’s hard to know where to stop. It just comes down to some trial-and-error, and knowledge with regard to ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, and XML -and WebPart development using .NET, C# and JavaScript.
SharePoint is a developer platform – with a lot of functionality “out of the box”. Customization can be point-and-click within SharePoint – or coded/deployed.
The alternative (to *NOT* use SharePoint) would be to go and create a database, web pages, classes, data layer, business logic and so forth – how long would that take ? Design, code, test, implement, support, bug-fix, etc.
Time = money, so if it takes a long time to do, it will cost a LOT of money.
SharePoint (and other “product”) haters will always say “I can do it better myself”.
Here’s another interesting comment :
Sharepoint gets sold to customers that don’t know programming.
I agree – clients don’t know or care about programming ! Should they ?!? Does that really matter ?
A customer doesn’t care if a product is written in C#, Python, COBOL or Spanish !
This statement from Emil Stenstrom is actually the reason a lot of clients DO like SharePoint :
They see a product that can handle all the features they want: blogs, wikis, forums, calendars, document libraries, workflows, and so on.
All features you could ever want is included, from what is called “out of the box”.
Yes, I know ! It does a lot out-of-the-box – that’s the reason to buy it !
Often it’s easier to rebuild that feature from scratch, than customizing what Sharepoint ships.
Not really – SharePoint is a product that delivers value-for-money to a LOT of organisations, and has a wealth of functionality that you don’t have to program or code – but yes, there is most likely some (or often a lot of) customization required.
But – it will be quicker to be up and running (hours/days – not months) – and you don’t need a team of developers, testers and so on – a lot of “power” business users can do a lot of stuff themselves.
That’s part of the problem with “developers” – they’re too keen to point out that they can do it better.
The wealth of “products” these days means that a business user can do a LOT without needing a developer – but, when it does get to that level, it CAN be fairly complicated and tricky.
I’m not just a SharePoint “lover” or trying to defend it. I’ve (personally) had a lot of problems with coding WebParts for SharePoint – and custom code/CSS – but I still see it as a valuable platform for enterprise customers.
P.S. Microsoft – can you pls. fix the functionality related to SEARCH and CONTENT DEPLEOYMENT – still fairly troublesome.
There’s not much of an alternative out there – for the price – or value-for-money.
If you drew an analogy to “buying a car”, the developer view is that everyone should get a car that has been assembled for them piece-by-piece, rather than a “generic” model that you could customise (wheels, colors, trim, options, etc)
And – imagine the cost ! And – not everyone NEEDS a custom hot-rod, the Ford Focus mass-produced model might meet MOST of their needs. And value-for-money.
It’s a business/financial decision – feature, function, benefit – value-for-money.
Often (unfortunately) most custom software development projects are *not* cost effective ! Buying a “product” and molding it to your business needs is the best approach – and SharePoint is one of the best of them.
</soapbox>
Filed under: Rant, SharePoint
Hi, and thanks for your comments. I won’t defend what Robert wrote in “MOSS should be spelt MOCKERY”, only what I wrote. As you might have read, I’m only talking about interface customization. And this is about it being to hard to customize, not that it’s impossible. I have experience from a lot of other CMS:es/frameworks, and all of them have been easier to customize (again, interface-wise).
I’m saying the interface developers should stay out of its way. If an organization wants to install it and go with what comes out of the box, that’s fine by me. Just don’t waste months of a developer’s time by trying to move that button a couple of pixels to the right.
The three articles I wrote (did you read them all?) are filled with reasons for why I don’t like it, not just bitching (as it sounds from your comments). My hope is that some of those will resonate all the way to Redmond.
So far Sharepoint is the worst of about 10 similar systems like this I’ve worked with, but all of the issues are things that can be fixed.
Nice blog and nice job done by you. Really appreciated. Do you have more knowledge on MOSS 07 then please write something more on that.
thanks
I couldn’t disagree with you more – sharepoint is one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever used. I respect your opinion, but I know things are far better elsewhere in the software arena.
Sharepoint is a giant rube-goldburg contraption, duct-taped together into a product in which so many compromises have been made almost nothing works as advertised. Just my opinion, of course, and I don’t have your experience with the product, but my impressions over the last six months of working on it are very negative.
Even some of the duct tape is falling away with the memory leaks in SPSite and SPWeb objects.
SharePoint requires endlessly patching to get anything new to work or keep existing functionality working. It is a never ending task to keep up with the patches, hotfixes, updates and service pack level. Heaven help you if you ever put one of these on in the wrong sequence.
Absolutely an overrated product.