Cracking Open the SharePoint Fortress 275
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by
timothy
from the file-formats-rule-the-world dept.
from the file-formats-rule-the-world dept.
dreemteem writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK:"SharePoint is a brilliant success, for a couple of reasons. In a way, it's Microsoft's answer to GNU/Linux: cheap and simple enough for departments to install without needing to ask permission, it has proliferated almost unnoticed through enterprises to such an extent that last year SharePoint Sales were $1.3 billion. But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits, it has one other key characteristic, hinted at in the Wikipedia entry above: it offers an effortless way for people to put content into the system, but makes it very hard to get it out because of its proprietary lock-in. This makes it a very real threat to open source. For example, all of the gains made in the field of open document standards — notably with ODF — are nullified if a company's content is trapped inside SharePoint." The article offers a slice of hope for getting around that, though, in the form of a new API for Google Sites which can slurp the data back out.
Just wondering... (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this story "hardware" related.
Re:Just wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just wondering... (Score:2)
Re:Just wondering... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
Sharepoint is a piece of collaboration based software that Microsoft developed. People can jointly work on documents or data stored on the server, and manage the security within their own niches. The design is primarily to give groups or projects their own space, and then give a lot of control over what happens there to the group leader.
While CMS features were mentioned by another user, they are almost an afterthought or byproduct of the other features, rather than the main purpose of this software. It also happens to SUCK for content management, and it's recommended you get another back end content server to store your Sharepoint managed or created data long term.
Re:Just wondering... (Score:3, Informative)
we use Sharepoint with non-ms products, it's just not offered out of the box. It's not hard to get set up though.
Business do see the light (Score:4, Interesting)
In times of financial troubles, companies look to alternatives but they need to be trusted known brands
Re:Business do see the light (Score:3, Insightful)
Editing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Uhh, which Wikipedia entry above?
Re:Editing? (Score:2)
Micro Google Lockin? (Score:4, Insightful)
So... in order to break the microsoft lockin you use an api that is only availible to google users only.
Sound a bit like "Free, More Free and Locked in... Again..." to me...
Re:Micro Google Lockin? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really... at least once you shake it out into Google, you can then move it one more hop into something usable and open.
Google's API is merely the means, not the end.
Re:Micro Google Lockin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Micro Google Lockin? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Micro Google Lockin? (Score:3, Insightful)
And well I am not talking super duper trade secrets. But stuff you don't want people finding out. Like how much you wasted on x project that never got going. Stuff that ends up in email, but you would rather not have people see.
Re:Micro Google Lockin? (Score:2)
I'd expect an API that provides Access to my data NOT to be usable by anyone without some kind of authentification.
bah, sharepoint. (Score:5, Informative)
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository. Don't even start me of Infopath documents being put in there to pretend to give it a forms engine. Its hell.
Thing is, I'm not entirely sure why all the myriad sharepoint sites that have sprung up at our company are so useless, I think its because its so easy to drop another document into another list that you end up with a sprawl of almost-related data, that's then impossible to find. Our admin did try to say that he'd put the search functionality on so it should be easier to find things... but when I searched for one document I received several thousand hits back!
Alternatively it could be because every department has their own sharepoint site, that no-one knows which one to look in for data, so they don't bother using it.
In any case, all the sharepoints here are crap, even the one the admin spent a lot of time on to give it a good sense of organisation.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Search is one of the biggest and most important features of SharePoint. If your admin had a clue, he/she would have set it up in the beginning with appropriate IFilters for all of the documents being uploaded. With that and proper meta tagging rules for document uploads, it really doesn't matter where it is inside SharePoint, as long as it's there. There are also 3rd party add-ins (BA Insight's Longitude, for example) that expand the capabilities of search.
The problems at your organization sound like bad planning on the part of whoever oversaw the implementation. The tools are there (and believe it or not, they are good tools, which is one of the reasons why SP is so popular), it's just easy to end up with a mess when the people setting it up have no idea what they're doing.
Non-thinking Sharepoint (Score:3, Informative)
The impression I got from just the crap summary was that Sharepoint is idiot easy to install without any planning. This means depending on the individual who sets it up, it'll either work wonderfully for you by enforcing proper tagging and indexing rules or it'll become a pit that simply costs money because you can't find anything important with it.
This is a classic example of Pick any two:
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Search is one of the biggest and most important features of SharePoint. If your admin had a clue, he/she would have set it up in the beginning with appropriate IFilters for all of the documents being uploaded.
If by adding appropriate iFilters you mean adding the PDF one, I think most admins get to that. If you mean actually supporting all the file types in use today (especially in an office that is not just using Microsoft products) I'd like to ask "are there such things and how much do they cost?" Last time I looked, there wasn't even an iFilter for MS Publisher, let alone anything from Adobe other than PDF. No Lotus or EPS or Quark or Framemaker or really anything useful. I don't think there were even OpenOffice plug-ins.
The problems at your organization sound like bad planning on the part of whoever oversaw the implementation.
Planning to implement SharePoint sounds like bad planning from all my experiences. It's a single vendor system with less capabilities than even freeware CMS's. You don't want any system designed and implemented by people who "have no idea what they're doing" as you put it. So if you have a manager evaluating options presented by a contractor or internal IT people and they say, "let's go with SharePoint" first ask them to show you their work where they compared it to Drupal. Then fire them and don't provide a recommendation unless it's to a competitor you want to harm.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:5, Funny)
Me neither, but I kinda like the way SharePoint spits random pages in Italian sometimes, it's like I'm a member of the Cosa Nostra or something :D
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't even start me of Infopath documents being put in there to pretend to give it a forms engine. Its hell.
Worse than hell, really... and not very secure. Our purchase req's at work use it, and I doubt the doc author would know what I was talking about if I asked her whether she sanitized her inputs or not (for example, I can give my own PR's authorization all the way to the VP of finance if I wanted to... and they rely on the damned thing now).
As for the rest? Dude, I'd give it every mod point I'd ever see for the next year if I could. I'm guessing it's your latter reason (too much diaspora, with little to hold it together) that explains why few people use it. A good web designer can overcome that very easily, but unfortunately? A good web designer and a good SharePoint developer are apparently almost never the same human being (hell, our SP "developer" gets lost in an Event Log... how am I supposed to help explain the basics of CSS to the guy?)
PS: The search function is pure hell to get working right, if at all. The consultant who put ours together actually knew what he was doing, and SP search still works only half-assed, so don't feel too badly about it.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:5, Interesting)
A good web designer and a good SharePoint developer are apparently almost never the same human being (hell, our SP "developer" gets lost in an Event Log... how am I supposed to help explain the basics of CSS to the guy?)
PS: The search function is pure hell to get working right, if at all. The consultant who put ours together actually knew what he was doing, and SP search still works only half-assed, so don't feel too badly about it.
You couldn't have been more accurate. 49 out of every 50 SharePoint "developers" I have talked to or interviewed are far from designers or software engineers. It's as if they were attracted to SharePoint because they were unable to make it in the real software development world. Not that this would necessarily be a problem, but SharePoint is one of the most difficult platforms I have ever had the unfortunate experience to program against. While these "developers" are busy building InfoPath forms and exposing tons of meaningless columns to interface with the workflow engine (they often use WF to overcome the fact that InfoPath is NOT a development platform), it's my job to interface the pile of mess with other COTS products by building convoluted ETL processes. The unfortunate truth of the whole situation is that the senior technical staff (e.g., CTO) fails to see the flaws that SharePoint brings. They focus their energy entirely on common CMS features, such as how easy it is to enable search and create a new page. If you dare suggest an alternative, you'll find yourself amongst the other outcasts --lonely, frustrated and unheard.
SharePoint is, by far, the most hideous platform I know of. It makes me long for the days of hacking HTML to make it render correctly in IE6.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:3, Funny)
it's my job to interface the pile of mess with other COTS products by building convoluted ETL processes
Oh man, I feel for you, I really do.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:4, Interesting)
Definitely... I do .NET and after one experience with SharePoint I personally won't go near again, and I know several other decent-or-better developers who feel the same way. If it comes up during a job description or even an interview I will immediately stop and say "I'm afraid I don't do Sharepoint" and look for another contract. Even in this economy.
The worst part is that Sharepoint jobs actually pay a strong premium over standard .NET development because it's such a big mess and because so few people will actually touch it.
sharepoint is another failure (Score:2, Informative)
O3Spaces [o3spaces.org]
Lenya [apache.org]
SugardCRM [sugarforge.org]
Alfresco [alfresco.com]
Main pyrus [mainpyrus.org]
Nuxeo [nuxeo.com]
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:3, Funny)
So we spent more money on an excellent 3rd Party search engine.
They'll be sending us all on expensive FrontPage courses next... On wait, they did that already. I got a certificate btw. I can now program web sites. I can even write forms
Worst searching capability ever (Score:2)
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository.
So true. The search capability makes share point useless to me as a CMS. I put in a search term and end up with a thousand results, none of which is at all relevant to the question I'm trying to answer.
Re:bah, sharepoint. (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously, you have a hundred ideas of how to make a better CMS than Sharepoint, so let's see you plop that money down where your mouth is and do it
Na, its already been done.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1385851&cid=29580409 [slashdot.org]
But those companies won't buy them because they're "not microsoft", not because of any technical reasons to do it, in fact, many of these don't even get evaluated because Sharepoint just hangs on the coat-tails of existing Office purchases.
Sharepoint is cheap? (Score:5, Informative)
It requires considerably more iron to run it than Wiki software, and the software licenses are very expensive.
We invested initially in Sharepoint, but can't afford to roll it out for the entire company.
Cheap is the last word I'd use to describe Sharepoint.
Depending on how and what you use Sharepoint for, companies should consider looking at MediaWiki and/or Alfresco for document storage, indexing, processing, sharing, etc.
Re:Sharepoint is cheap? (Score:2)
IIRC, the license key was nearly a universal one for the longest time...
(not advocating anyone actually putting that info to nefarious use or anything - just sayin' is all...)
Re:Sharepoint is cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it depends on what flavor of SharePoint you are using. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) is licensed as part of Windows Server, so you aren't paying extra for something that you may already have. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Systems (MOSS) is licensed separately can the costs can very rapidly grow to very large numbers for larger enterprises depending on what features are desired or how the farm is laid out.
Re:Sharepoint is cheap? (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on what version of MOSS you are licensing. The base server license is around $4k. Each user also needs a standard cal at around $95, and optionally an enterprise cal for another $75 to utilize the enterprise services. Alternatively instead of the CAL route, you can license the entire server with Sharepoint for Internet Sites for around $40k which gets you unlimited users on the one server. There are also additional server editions for just search, excel services, and forms server that are less then $40k but have reduced functionality.
A typical enterprise Sharepoint farm has two load balanced front end servers, plus a back end application and search server. If you had 200 users licensed for enterprise use, it would cost around $46k for the 3-server setup. However if you went the Sharepoint for Internet Sites route, it would be $120,000 for those same 3 servers. Sharepoint for Internet Sites advantage though is that you don't need CALs, so for extranet scenarios or where you don't know specifically how many external users would be authenticating to the server, you are covered.
To be properly licensed, you'll also need the appropriate license(s) and/or external connectors for Windows Server and SQL server for the internal and external users. Those costs are hard to give estimates as it varies from company to company. If a user already has an existing Server or SQL cal, an additional one may not be required for an installation.
Sharepoint makes me mad (Score:5, Interesting)
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A>
<div align=center><strong><font size=4>Welcome to My Group wiki site!</font></strong></div><strong><font size=3></font></strong></div>
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A><strong><font size=3></font></strong> </div>
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A>
<div align=left><font size=3></font><font size=2>Welcome to the Department Wiki. Remember, this is your wiki, so please don't hesitate to add and/or enhance existing pages, and fix mistakes or errors.</font></div><font size=2></font></div><br>
<h1><font size=5>Starting Points</font></h1>
Re:Sharepoint makes me mad (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll second that. Give me a mediawiki for collaboration and content, and a subversion repository for document storage and i'm happy. Shitepoint is just another crappy M$ product that is a pain to use and tries to lock you to their other crappy products.
Re:Sharepoint makes me mad (Score:2, Interesting)
sounds like your install of sharepoint is your problem. We have thosands of users, have no problems with permissions, finding data with search, and it works great in firefox. It was easy to implement and cheap given that users needed almost zero training and the hardware it required was very low (For a server which is all that is ever allowed in our datacenters)
Uhm... (Score:5, Informative)
Grab the information from the web services and do whatever you wish with the resulting data - its neither hard nor hidden, so this story is pointless.
Re:Uhm... (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly. How do you think Google was able to access the supposed FORTRESS of data that was locked inside of Sharepoint? They read the manuals!! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint
I'd be curious how soon Google will allow you to extract your documents from Google Docs back into your Wiki...which, btw, is it's own form of fortress depending on which vendor you go with.
Re:Uhm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, you can drag and drop your files out of a document library using Windows Explorer, this is hard? Or, for single items, left-click the down arrow, click Send To, click Download a copy, fuck this is hard! BTW, this even works in FireFox, though you do have to disable NoScript, which I guess can be hard if you have a room temperature IQ.
Oh ya, and as someone else has already pointed out, you could always dig into the SDK [microsoft.com] and write programs against it to move data in and out.
But yes, SharePoint is a fortress which eats your data, pollutes the environment, and kicks puppy dogs.
Come on guys, MS's software has enough problems, without us making shit up.
CEO's point of view (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CEO's point of view (Score:2)
And yet some companies (presumably the smaller ones) are willing to use Google Apps for their emails. Personally, I never understood that for exactly the reasons you mention.
Re:CEO's point of view (Score:2)
Companies have been outsourcing the processing of enormous amounts of vital, confidential information for time immemorial.
Lots of companies outsource HR, payroll, legal, some aspects of accounting, bookkeeping and IT. Indeed, entire industries exist based around the idea that most companies don't really need someone who understands HR law|accounting|IT on staff for 37.5 hours/week.
An inevitable side-effect of this is that vitally important, incredibly confidential information is already held by outside organisations. Frankly, some of the companies offering managed Exchange services (and there are loads) come across as downright shady compared with Google.
Re:CEO's point of view (Score:2)
That sounds like it came from a clueful CEO. Most of the ones I've met would respond with "Google? I use them all the time, let's do it."
Is it really that popular? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is it really that popular? (Score:2)
The made $1.3 billion in sales last year. In what way is that not a "success"?
How hard is it? (Score:5, Informative)
What is this lock in? I RTFA and skimmed the linked wikipedia article, and couldn't find any details.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Documents are also in the database as binary objects. Pulling them out and saving to the local file system can be an exercise for your intern or first year programmer.
The API for SharePoint is fairly well documented. If you wanted to migrate a site from SharePoint to another platform, recreating the look and feel may be a challenge--likely depending on your design skills--but getting your data out will not be.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:2)
I hate Shitpoint and everything it does. Teaching people a little HTML would be cheaper and easier.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Complete nonsense. Sure, SharePoint stores List content inside of a database, but it's stored as XML, making parsing a royal pain, not to mention it makes referential integrity among Lists impossible. Lookup lists have very loosely been implemented. Nobody in their right mind would work with SharePoint directly at the database level. Nor is it supported by MS. This is why a public API has been exposed.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:4, Informative)
If you work on web services all day, CAML and XML are second nature to you, and you have quite a bit of experience with MS api's, you might be able to make sharepoint usable from other applications... but many of us in smaller businesses have better stuff to do and would be better served using something open source, or at least where you can reasonably access your data. I wish the management understood that. However the ability to setup sections for each department, and have a project page for every project in a month (but they were all unconnected sites, with no integrity, then users were given access to create their own sites/pages) was too much "Oooh, neat and shiny" for the execs to handle... oh what a mess.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever. Yes, it's too hard. Years to understand.
Only I've done it. And it did take weeks, not years. And I'm not that smart.
Remember, we're not talking about being able to save changes to the SharePoint database. The database is designed to work on through the app and contains no user serviceable parts.
In just addressing the issue of lock-in and being able to get your data and documents out of SharePoint, between the API and SQL, there isn't anything you can't get out programmatically.
If CAML and XML are outside of your understanding, then this isn't the job for you.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:2)
But, per the fanbois, it's a Microsoft product, therefore it is inherently evil and must be destroyed. The truth is that SharePoint is a fabulous product. I use it at work and at home with a variety of document types and have no issues. Those documents are even search-able if a filter is available.
I could care less who made SharePoint. It's a horrible platform and that's the end of the story. On the other hand, I actually love the .NET platform. ASP.NET has been great, for years and I have had the privilege of working on some really great projects that made use of the platform. With the recent release of ASP.NET MVC, I am even more inclined to stick with .NET as my development platform of choice for most organizations.
The reason I dislike SharePoint so much is because it's almost always more cost effective and easier to build something from scratch. Developers and technology leaders should choose a technology platform that is cost-effective and extensible. SharePoint is neither. 100% of the estimates that I (along with many, many other developers) have put together have significantly more development hours associated with them.
Reverse Engineer (Score:5, Informative)
Not that hard to reverse engineer the schema.
This fellow has open sourced a tool to crack it open:
http://blog.dreamdevil.com/index.php/2007/03/13/sharepoint_2003_database_exporter/ [dreamdevil.com]
Back Before Sharepoint came along... (Geeklog) (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day before Sharepoint, as a school assignment for one of my higher level CIS Classes I was tasked with making a CMS where as people could upload (Word) documents to the CMS in the form of Articles.
The closest I was ever able to get is with an an application called GeekLog. But there was absolutely no automation. I tinkered with the HTML export aspect of Word, it was an absolute abortion. Useless with Geeklog.
Now that we have linkable libraries for everything under the sun in Linux, I always wondered the following: Why could it not be setup such that so long as an Acceptable format was uploaded (DOC, ODT, WPD, etc) could be parsed into an XHTML 1.0 Compliant article.
I never could lick that problem.
Then another problem came up. I needed a way to Authenticate Geeklog against LDAP, and later single sign on with Kerberos.
I was thinking this all the way back in 2003 and 2004.
Then, low and behold, I start hearing about the abomination that is: Sharepoint.
After I heard about I was like "oh damn it. They got write what all these LAMP Stack PHP applications couldn't think of: LDAP, Kerberos, and the ability to turn binary documents into readable searchable articles."
It was like my worst nightmare come true. GeekLog was a prime example of how Linux developers could have stopped the sharepoint nightmare before it started.
Re:Back Before Sharepoint came along... (Geeklog) (Score:2)
> They got write what all these LAMP Stack PHP applications couldn't think of: LDAP, Kerberos, and the ability to turn binary documents into readable
A very old idea actually. There were document management products on the market in the mid-90s that did this.
Re:Back Before Sharepoint came along... (Geeklog) (Score:2)
I wondered why when Sharepoint was released, in the same manner as Geeklog developed XML-RPC Plugins for Gallery, why they didn't develop XML-RPC Plugins for eGroupware as well. The idea being that eGroupware could integrate with Geeklog the same way it did with Gallery.
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
After I heard about I was like "oh damn it. They got write what all these LAMP Stack PHP applications couldn't think of: LDAP, Kerberos, and the ability to turn binary documents into readable searchable articles."
My gut feeling is there are some details missing. LDAP and Kerberos are not interdependent. Especially for web applications. However, in Microsoft's world, it is.
This suggests you were trying, like *many* before and after you, to connect a LAMP stack with a Microsoft identity stack. Microsoft makes this intentionally difficult, so there should be little surprise that it's an epic fail.
GeekLog was a prime example of how Linux developers could have stopped the sharepoint nightmare before it started.
If it was that simple, Microsoft would have been in the has-been ranks populated by Novell a long time ago.
Microsoft drowns out competing platforms and even their own developer-base when the market is big enough roughly in this order.
1. They bring consistently inferior product to market, then spend their way into the market segment. The disconnect here is that their core market is where the purchasing manager is totally disconnected from IT. That is most big IT shops.
2. Microsoft AND the executive class who bought the license blames IT for bungling the deployment.
Microsoft wins!
Cracking success? (Score:2)
I would also warn people against believing Microsoft's hype about Sharepoint. It's a good tool for a specific purpose, but it won't solve every problem you have. Make sure YOUR company is suitable for the way Sharepoint works. Don't expect Sharepoint to be flexible to your requirements.
Re:Cracking success? (Score:2)
It does, partially. To get the full experience, IE and ActiveX are required. But FF, Safari, etc all work on a basic level.
Apparently, SharePoint 2010 will support FF [msdn.com] natively
"A standards based browser such as Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.x will be required to author content."
Re:Cracking success? (Score:2)
On the other hand, Sharepoint enforces it's L&F pretty tightly, and it can be a fair hassle to make it look like anything like Sharepoint, and it really, really, wants you to use IE for editing. And, speaking of editing, since almost everything is done in the browser, if you break a template badly enough that it can't be rendered, you're screwed. Not that I've done that or anything.
And, finally, it's a long way from cheap, once you add up all of the various licenses you need for it.
Google Sites not a panacea (Score:2)
There are a lot of organizations that, while sharepoint isn't necessarily the "best answer", it is the only solution that allows for a quick deployment.
U.S. Government organizations and their contractors would never be allowed to store documents anywhere except within their own infrastructure. I would love to see a "Google Sites" internal deployment option...
Pretty easy to get list data out of sharepoint (Score:2)
http://solitarysoftwareguy.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
The data is not "locked" in (Score:3, Insightful)
And I don't see how it is an explicit threat to ODF because end users can easily store any document type in SharePoint. The only threat is that SharePoint offers integration with Office - but that doesn't prevent people from using ODF, it just encourages usage of Office.
I'm not suggesting that SharePoint is a good platform, but let's not bash it for locking users in and locking out competing products when it is merely retaining users by being just good enough to keep them content.
SharePoint is the new DOS... (Score:2)
Not True--and how Sharepoint actually proliferates (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm.. Seriously? You are really kidding me.. I mean REALLY? It is not any of those things boasted--not remotely close. I worked with Sharepoint for the last two years, installing, administering, and using for a state university. It is absolutely the most unrecommendable software product I have EVER worked with. It has worked reasonably well (not great) only for one purpose for us: a document repository. Version control only really works when using Microsoft Office 2007. Otherwise, it'll wipe out your version histories.
(1) Ease of installation -- It's highly complex. You really do need to read the 700 page book Microsoft has to know how to install it. This is because numerous options at install time cannot be changed later except by re-installation. And I mean many numerous options that are very difficult to understand how each relates to the other.. We reinstalled so many times, paid for expensive consulting both with Microsoft and with an outside firm. We still couldn't get it right. The nuances are many and hit you repeatedly often with the only fix being a reinstallation.... and usually rebuilding of content, along with it.
AND users almost universally hate it. Management fights hard against the wishes of users to implement Sharepoint--not only at our organisation but also at every other organisation I've had to privilege to ask their sysadmins about. Management usually hails its success but on the ground, it's almost universally hated and a disaster. Oh, yes.. Our universities library system also had a successful use of a simple trouble ticket management system... so there were two exceptions. It's also easier to install and administer as a single server than as a farm, but still not so easy and no easier on users.
I cannot stress enough--the problem with Sharepoint are the many many MANY critical nuances.
(2) Inexpensive -- No. It's very expensive. The learning curve is quite high so training is really required. In our case, the expense was bundled in with a variety of other software licenses such as that for Exchange. Alone, the license is very expensive--particularly if you want to open it up to outside your organisation's intranet.
But the real expense is in administration. Both training costs, immense amounts of time spent with it, and dealing with problems ongoing are the highest costs I've ever seen for a server application. Upgrades are also a huge difficulty. They present as opportunities to resolve some former configuration problems but taking advantage thereof often means your data is not restorable.
Of all the alternative applications I've worked with, "Typo 3" is the most Sharepoint-like, functionally. It is, however, far easier to learn and it is reliable. Sharepoint is reliable only in the sense that its processes keep running--that doesn't mean it doesn't break regularly. The best general purpose CMS I have worked with is definitely Drupal. Drupal lacks some of the capabilities of Sharepoint (presuming those capabilities were actually usable in Sharepoint in any meaningful sense) but has many others.
The problem is that Sharepoint is not exactly a CMS. It is (and I am speaking in theory--not practice in practical terms) a collaboration environment. There really is a difference. Drupal itself has a learning curve that I don't like. It's more administrator focused and not user focused, as manifested by the fact that you cannot edit things were they are seen by users but rather must work through a back panel. Drupal also lacks a WebDAV document repository and the ability to do things like email in documents and other kinds of content and get email notifications of content or documents modified.
Drupal is about setting up a classical website for users to use and administrators to administer. Sharepoint (in theory) is about providing a service where users can create their own sites, document and data repositories and means of presenting and sharing the same (via tags and filters). It's about working together within an or
Re:Not True--and how Sharepoint actually prolifera (Score:2)
Too Little, Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the pioint here. (Score:2)
Sharepoint and Google Docs are different Animals and people tend not to understand that. Microsoft does not run Sharepoint, they sell you Sharepoint and you install it on Windows Servers internally. You can't install Google Docs on your own servers.
there are a few applications that come close to Sharepoint in the Linux world, like GeekLog and Knowlege tree, but in the Linux world, there is the parasite of unnecessary duplication. Everyone wants to store authentication on MySQL servers. (I'm not knocking MySQL, its excellent for so many beloved tasks, just not authentication.) But thats a square peg for a round hole.
Sharepoint lock-in (Score:2, Interesting)
If you look at deploying MS-Sharepoint, you'll find that you need to have MS-ActiveDirectory, and hence, MS-Windows PCs and CALs. Sharepoint deployments are usually $25K+ for anything beyond a trivial lab deployment.
OTOH, http://www.alfresco.com/ [alfresco.com] provides similar DMS and CMS capabilities. You can use the free version very easily or pay a $3k for support. It can connect to any LDAP for authentication and authorization. There are no CALs. Alfresco was created by former EMC/Documentum people - they understand document management.
I'm just a CIO that deployed the free Alfresco in our company over a year ago. Besides that, I have no other affiliation.
Abombination, but... (Score:3, Informative)
While I agree Sharepoint is an abombination, when I've had the misfortune to interact with it (usually, I've needed to do so with various scripts), I found you can actually NET USE Sharepoint as if it were just a normal CIFS drive, and access everything as files.
I don't see what's difficult about getting your documents out again in bulk.
A friend's experience with SharePoint sucked (Score:3, Interesting)
Her boss finally left, a more flexible one came in, and now all of their old servers have been replaced with *nix with a growing rollout of PostgreSQL and life is much happier there.
U.S. Bank drops SharePoint (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138020/U.S._Bank_picks_IBM_s_Lotus_platform_over_Microsoft_s_SharePoint [computerworld.com]
Sharepoint. Don't get me started on it! (Score:3, Informative)
Here is our experience with Sharepoint:
- It's SLOW AS HELL. It is mind-blowingly, unbelievably slow. I have NEVER seen such a slow system in my life!
- The search function is un-useable, except for poking fun at results. Rating hits in some xls Documents higher than hits on wiki pages - COME ON, MICROSOFT, EVEN YOU CAN'T BE THAT STUPID!
- Collaboration? Yeah, right - 2 guys from my department worked with 2 other guys in 2 other departments on a document. After 3 days, the damn thing just swallowed the document! No way to roll back, no way to find it (IT also gave up after a few hours of search). It's GONE!
- The WIKI functionality (editor) is awful. Just awful. It changes the spacing between lines at its' liking. No way to fix it, short of turning to HTML mode and repairing it manually, just to see it f*** up again after the next update!
I could go on forever, but I guess you get the picture. MS sure does have some fine products, although I despise their business practice. Sharepoint, however, is NOT one of those fine ones!
OK, I calmed down. Now I go back to work...
Re:This is great news if (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also good news if you like competition. Now you've at least got an option to switch, which puts some pressure on Microsoft. And if Google can do this, someone else could, too.
This isn't "good vs evil." It's "choice vs no choice." And it looks like choice just scored a point.
Re:This is great news if (Score:4, Insightful)
FUD.
Choice is a point it already had with Sharepoint. I work a lot with content management systems (sadly), many reports (particularly Gartner) suggest using SharePoint as a front end and something else as the back end for your content storage - and strongly recommend AGAINST using Sharepoint for a content server/storage role. I know where I work (and several other places) use Oracle Universal Content Server to store the data, and SharePoint only when working on it (you could probably integrate just as easily with Drupal or some other content storage system). Getting the content out of these is often easy. In Oracle Universal Content Server, I can use the archiving tool to generate an archive, and then write a simple script in most scripting languages to toss the files into a directory structure that is more end-user friendly, or parse the data for use in importing into another content server.
If you don't know how to use your product, then don't complain about it lacking a feature that it actually has.
No Lock In (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, SharePoint integrates with office. Surprise! But, you aren't locked in. No, SharePoint doesn't trap anything. SharePoint out-of-the-box, is o.k. To make it USEFUL, you extend it with features. Features can be purchased or developed. One such add on is StoragePoint that allows all the BLOB storage to be moved to the file system, other DB's, other CMS, etc.
The common answer to the lack of a feature in an OSS project is, "Well, write it yourself." If you need a feature in SharePoint that isn't available OOTB, or COTS, you can...surprise, write it yourself.
Re:No Lock In (Score:3, Insightful)
If you go default on SharePoint, then it is very easy to find what you want in the SharePoint contentdb. It's in SQL and very accessable. It's very easy to pull it out of SP and shove it into something else, including XML. You can go raw, not recommended, but very doable and discoverable, you can go through the object model, very easy, or you can go through the web services. So, I have a real problem with the term "Lock In".
If you have a SQL programmer or a .net programmer or a programmer that can do web services, you don't have lock in.
Re:This is great news if (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually quite trivial - and getting more so to move your data out of google apps.
See the recent 'data liberation' things they've been doing.
Re:This is great news if (Score:4, Insightful)
This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light. I suspect that google will have their own lock-in however.
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense? Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in. The reason: when that solution is no longer the best/most painless/cheapest you will have a hell trying to change it. It's about risk and assessment, and you can put whatever label you want on it, be it Google, Microsoft or Joe's Software. There are other options. Options that try to keep you as a customer by being the best, instead of holding your data hostage. How is this difficult to anyone?
Re:This is great news if (Score:2, Informative)
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
Re:This is great news if (Score:2)
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
I'm not following. Where did I say that I'm using Google's proprietary products?
Re:This is great news if (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
There's a difference between using proprietary products and being locked in to proprietary products. If you use a proprietary mail server (for example) that stores its spools in maildir format and implements IMAP and SMTP, then you are not locked in because you can replace it with an (open or proprietary) alternative easily.
Google makes it easy to extract your data and put it somewhere else. Sharepoint does not. That means that you are not locked in to Google's products if you choose to use them, while you are if you use Sharepoint. It's not about Microsoft being intrinsically evil and Google being intrinsically good, it's about the relative difficulty in ditching either of them in the future.
Re:This is great news if (Score:3, Informative)
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
Google makes it easy to extract your data and put it somewhere else. Sharepoint does not.
The only problem I can see with your statement is that it is completely wrong.
Getting data or files out of SharePoint is dead simple. Aside from a large number of client choices including Windows Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Access, and SharePoint Designer you can create custom interfaces. If you want to create your own interfaces, there is a well documented Web Services API, a well documented RPC API, and over course a set of components if the custom code is running on the server.
The Office apps cost money, but Windows Explorer is Windows, SharePoint Designer is free, and the only things that would stop you from using the programmatic interfaces would be a decision to them to harden security or a lack of knowledge.
Re:This is great news if (Score:2)
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
No, when you jump to Microsoft's defense you're jumping to Microsoft's defense. The article was about letting you migrate data out of Sharepoint using a free tool provided by Google. That means you have a way to move things out of Sharepoint if you want, not that you're forced to move off of SharePoint and use Google. This means you have a choice as opposed to no choice. Whatever you think about MS or Google as companies does not matter to whether or not having choice is a good thing. The fact that Google provided the choice means they did something good for users, even if they did so for selfish reasons.
In response to this article you wrote, "This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light." That demonstrates a specific bias. An analogy would be an article that says John Smith opened up an auto shop downtown so now there are two shops. You can go to Bob Johnsons's auto body as everyone has been or you can go to the new shop. And then you reply, "This is great news if you believe that Bob Johnson is pure evil and John Smith is goodness and light." That's a clear bias.
That would be surprising. (Score:5, Informative)
Gmail supports imap. Google Calender supports iCal. Google Docs exports natively to OpenDocument. GTalk uses Jabber and Jingle. Google Chrome is open source, as is Google Wave, Android, and plenty of other things I can't remember offhand.
I haven't really seen that much in terms of lock-in from Google, beyond the fact that they often provide the best implementation -- for example, I don't see how you could lock someone into a search engine, yet Google Search remains dominant because it's actually good.
Can you give me your reason for believing Google would lock people in? Any evidence to back that up?
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:2)
Remember, *parts* of each of these things are open source, not all, due to apache license. If they were really trying to make it 100% open source they'd be looking at GPL. Meanwhile, they're doing a thousandfold better than other giant companies in their situation.
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:2)
Isn't the apache Licence open source? (perhaps except some zealots)
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:2)
Well, sure. But that doesn't mean everything is continuously licensed under the Apache license.
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, *parts* of each of these things are open source, not all, due to apache license.
They are completely open source and Open Source - OSI certified, and GPLv3 compatible. They're just not completely "Free Software" (which is just a particularly restrictive form of open source and therefore less free in the dictionary sense than Apache licensed code).
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
That locked propritary box is MINE. Not Microsoft's, not Googles, MINE.
Oh, the naivete...
I don't have to trust Microsoft one bit, unless Microsoft puts spyware into its product.
WGA isn't spyware?
Nonetheless, you also have to trust not only that Microsoft hasn't put spyware in there already, but that they won't distribute such spyware as an update, ever.
Google's 'robots' look at my data.
So do Microsoft's programs, running inside "your" proprietary box.
I am sure that Google sends its 'partners' "anonymous" information based on my documents.
Here's an example [youtube.com] -- scroll just under the video, and click "Statistics & Data".
That's the kind of information Google, or their partners, actually care about. See that gigantic graph there? Thunderf00t can see a lot of powerful things -- he can see the number of visits, number of comments, number of 5-star ratings, number of 1-star ratings, etc etc.
But he can't see how you rated him, unless you tell him.
Can you make a case at all that this is an inappropriate amount of data?
Google's robots designed for specific advertizers look at my data.
I wasn't aware Google custom-built them for specific advertisers. I know for a fact that they build general-purpose robots, which then choose from available advertisers.
And there is no way I can even really say Google doesn't look at my stuff, IT IS WHAT THEY DO! Someone looks at what the 'robots' pick up eventually.
Citation needed.
I'm going to say, no, they don't. They can look at large, overall trends. Can you give me a solid technical reason why Google would have to look at your personal data in order to run their robots?
Or, let me put it this way: Do you really think anyone at Google actually visits each one of the billions (trillions?) of pages they index?
Google makes money by reading peoples stuff.
Wrong.
Google makes money by analyzing people's stuff. They really, really don't care about your ultra-secret corporate document. All they care about is whether that document talks about, say, weight and nutrition, so they can show you an ad for Weight Watchers, and try to spot other correlations -- which documents, when presented with a Weight Watchers ad, actually resulted in a purchase? Still way too much data for a human to analyze, so let the robot find those correlations, and how those documents are different from documents which did not result in a purchase, and fine-tune their advertising algorithms based on that.
None of this process results in a Google employee, or anyone from another company, having to actually look at the data directly.
I'm not saying it's impossible that they do look at it. But you're asserting that they do, without evidence, based on what seems to me a misunderstanding of how they work.
At least Microsoft makes it money by raping you on software prices. You can trust them MORE to not read your stuff, as they can still make money other ways.
Except Google does have a for-pay service. I'm not sure if it disables ads -- then again, Microsoft is also attempting to make money selling ad space.
The difference is, as much as we've made fun of Google for "violating" their corporate "Don't be Evil" motto, the evilest things Google has ever done don't come close to what Microsoft has done, and is doing. So no, I have no reason to trust Microsoft more than I trust Google.
When it comes right down to it, I'll trust neither of them, to the extent that it's practical. But at a certain point, outsourcing parts of your infrastructure is a Good Idea.
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:4, Informative)
to talk all about how great Google is because of a few token open source gestures
"Token"?
Chrome, and v8, forced browsers to start looking at Javascript performance, the way Firefox forced people to start innovating beyond IE6, and at least trying to support standards.
It also forced browsers to start going multiprocess, and stop crashing the entire browser when something goes wrong with a single tab -- not to mention that this, too, is a performance enhancement.
I'm actually surprised now when people talk about Slashdot's Javascript being slow, or slower than the HTML version, because that's not the case on my Chromium nightly.
And that's just one example.
Now, the actual motivation may be profit-driven -- in this case, Google's core revenue-base is based on the Web, so anything Google can do to improve the Web, or increase the utility of those services (for example, providing ads in Gmail, and Gmail is better on a faster browser), directly benefits Google.
But you know what? I don't care. It means Google's interests are aligned with mine and with the open source community, and it means the potential for deception is lower, since the most likely ulterior motive is right out there in the open. It's not that there's a hidden greedy agenda -- there's a very open greedy agenda, that happens to improve the Web for everyone.
And of course,
to talk all about how great Google is because of a few token open source gestures...
...and support for open standards.
And data portability.
And actual, working code behind their ideas.
And a complete lack of vendor lock-in.
My point was, Google isn't likely to lock things in, because they haven't done so in the past. They have, indeed, been about interoperability -- open standards, and often open source. The things they've kept proprietary often operate via open standards -- even Google Earth uses KML, which is supported by things like KDE Marble.
The only exception I can think of is Google Maps, and it's not as though you have data in there that would need to be ported. About the most proprietary thing they have is YouTube, and they're experimenting with providing that via HTML5.
Re:That would be surprising. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that they still have to pay the people who work on Chrome. It doesn't make sense for it to be motivated purely by money.
Re:This is great news if (Score:5, Informative)
Can only say one thing to this: http://www.dataliberation.org/ [dataliberation.org]
Re:This is great news if (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't the Data Liberation group the same group that kidnapped Patty Hearst?
Data wants to be free! People? Not so much.
Re:This is great news if (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot sensationalism/FUD (Score:2)
There is no out of the box mass export, but coming up with a script to stream binary objects from the database to the file system is a trivial exercise.
Re:billion dollar hit my ass (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw it in a Fortune 100 company. Didn't see it anywhere in another Fortune 500 company.
Wouldn't expect smaller companies to use it.
It seems like the perfect thing for companies so large with such
a crushing beaurocracy that all effectiveness and productivity is
also crushed.
The SharePoint Primer (Score:3, Informative)
im not even going to bother googling the stats on that one, but since ive never heard of SharePoint before...
The SharePoint primer for the clueless and lazy:
Microsoft has sold more than 100 million seat licenses since 2001
and is on track to generate $1 billion in SharePoint-related revenue this year.
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
General Mills, a longtime SharePoint user, is replacing all its file sharing systems with SharePoint and has begun using it for blogs and wikis, and to automate some workflows. The maker of Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, and 100 other food brands counts 20,000 active SharePoint users, with more than 1,500 people contributing content on a regular basis.
Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling? [informationweek.com] [Nov 1, 2008]
Re:billion dollar hit my ass (Score:3, Insightful)