What Do Sharepoint Bloggers Say About Their Product?
I have read a lot of comments about the discussion taking place within the Notes community. There are some who seem to feel the discussion should not be taking place at all, that it is negative and merely provides ammunition to out competitors. I do not wish to extend that discussion/debate any further with this post. But if you read the posts closely with an open mind and do not try to twist them to suit a particular viewpoint you had before you read the posts, then you will probably notice a few things. The posts from people who have actually used Lotus Notes as a development platform are passionate about the product. They may have some questions about how the product can be improved or better marketed. They love it and want to keep working with it more than anything else. Almost without exception there are no posts from the Notes community that its product sucks as an application development platform. Comments along those lines seem to be being injected into the discussion by members of the Microsoft community. To get a better perspective I thought I would look at how the Sharepoint community views their own product in their own blogosphere. Here are a few select comments that I doubt Micro$oft will be sharing with its customers anytime soon:- .
- Although my company is a big advocate of Sharepoint and I’m the main
Sharepoint developer for my company, I hate it with a passion and try to
steer clear of it and recommend against it as much as possible
- I think SharePoint sucks, and if you are considering going for a new
platform for your collaboration or your publishing or your wiki or your
blogging needs, choose differently.
- If I want a good blogging solution, why would I want a mediocre wiki
site, a mediocre document management solution, and a mediocre web
content management solution, bundled with a mediocre blogging solution?
This won’t give me anything I need, compared to getting a good blogging
solution and a good wiki solution as separate products.
- SharePoint has many quirks, performs like a milk van on a steep slope
and makes most developers moan
- As was explained to me, Sharepoint is like having your
kids put your laundry away. You know where you put it, but they put it
somewhere else. Or, it's like telling someone that what they are
lookiong for is in Alabama. Technically correct, but useless.
- One of the things I've noticed on blogs, user group meetings, etc., is
that all of the most successful projects seem to be 'SharePoint and
something'. SharePoint and a better blog. SharePoint and a WCM system.
SharePoint and a real RM system.
- Sharepoint is terrible for a developer. If you can deal with the huge
limitations out of the box and don’t have to do any coding or
customization, OK. Otherwise, you’re better off using another platform.
- Sharepoint: simple to use out of the box, impossible to customize.
- IT'S A COMPLETE PILE OF SHIT. With sugar on top that appeals to owners
and CEOs and they they realize later what a mistake it was to even use
the API.
- I have purposely stayed away from any job opportunity that mentioned
coding in SharePoint. As soon as I hear that in an interview or even
see it in the job description, I flee. I stop right there and pass the
opportunity because I have been in environments that think SharePoint is
this end-all solution when in the end it's a complete API pile and in
about 2-3 years you end up having huge costs involved after spending
money coding (hacking around the shitty API and everything else that
SharePoint throws in your face)
- SharePoint's support of non-IE browsers is horrible.
- Customers are easily impressed and sold when a salesperson, whether that
person is a consultant or a bone-fide seller, demonstrate how easy it
is to hack together a working proof-of-concept. When a real architect or
developer enters the project, customers are shocked to learn that
developing a SharePoint solution is nothing different from any other
software development project and is a lot more expensive than the
impression left by the sales process.
- Development is a royal pain in SharePoint.
- Writing custom code for SharePoint is like wearing handcuffs,
- Developing in Sharepoint is like swimming in a burning river, with your
arms and legs tied to heavy rocks!
- Stuff that takes 10 min in e.g. aps.net or WinForms, takes hours / days
in Sharepoint
- It is one of the most unflexable applications I have ever used.
- Far too complex to install, configure, and customize. It is not agile.
- It’s a perfect example of trying to build something that does
everything, making the software so complicated that it is so hard to
use, that it is useless.
- I work for a large company - trying to do the basics, and essentially
it's become a career to get Microsoft products to work. I just wanted to
create a dashboard and took me days to figure out how to do this on
SharePoint. Waste of time.
- It is far more easy too learn J2EE, Ruby On Rails, C++ multi-inheritance
or any other than than the sharepoint architecture and permissions and
mysiotes, and sites subsites, lists, wikis and excekls, and kpis all
together
- I tend to agree that Sharepoint sucks. Using it is like closing your
eyes, holding your breath and spinning around for thirty seconds. When
your done you dont know where you are, you are very dizzy, and feel like
you might throw up…
- it’s not very user friendly, and searching for a particular document,
library or list on a Sharepoint site can be at the very least
problematic
- STAY AWAY… Sharepoint can be an incredibly useful tool, but in any
office where I’ve seen it deployed, it’s acting merely as a web-based
front-end to the file-system.
- I hate Sharepoint with the passion of 10,000 burning Lotus Notes
users
- Honestly, I found Sharepoint so inadequate and typical of a first
generation MS product that I could only shake my head at it. If it was
made by anyone else than MS and had to compete on its merits I suspect
most of us would have never even heard of it
- I've developing under sharepoint for the better part of this moth and I
have to say Sharepoint sucks big time. Sure, as long as you need only
the basic features, you're fine. But when you decide you need something
extra, even if it's so simple a web developer would implement in an
hour (say voting for documents), then you're in for a ride. Developing
for sharepoint is nothing but a nightmare. The system is overly
complex, unintuitive and just plain bizarre. I swear, we've spent
almost a week trying to implement some of the features, when we could
have written a fully functional php/postgresql site in that time.
- Share point sucks ****. It is confusing, the documentation is little or
absent. However, all the higher ups at my corperation have accepted it
with open arms because the consultants told them too. The consultants
are now getting paid 60 dollars an hour to teach it. I hate share point.
- I've been DEVELOPING with Sharepoint for a YEAR now. IT SUCKS, IT
SUCKS, IT SUCKS....
- The bottom line is that the team in charge of developing sharepoint
sucks (believe me I am an ex MS employee).
- SharePoint is only good for what it was developed for: Collaboration. I
think where SharePoint begins to suck is when management is sold on the
fact that EVERYTHING needs to go into SharePoint. Then developers start
thinking that SharePoint sucks...because if applications are expected to
be developed in SharePoint, well, it sucks.
- Our web guys can barely make the thing work correctly, so how are end
users supposed to make it work correctly and design sites taht are easy
for others to use, navigate and find information? We are going to end
up with a bunch of lists and shared folders that store Word, Excel, and
PPT files with absolutely no context to the documents and thousands of
different ways that teams and "site admins" will use to present
information.
- I am a SharePoint admin guy for my department, and have attended a $1500
SharPoint course that took two days. It is not intuitive, and
follows little of Windows years of established PC convention
- i have noooooo idea how this is making things better. All it does is it
makes you buy more MS products and makes you buy a MS SQL server - The
pathetic part is that i have to sell this to my users
- Holy ****, ****ryin out loud! I hate SharePoint. There is absolutely
no Software Dev process .... God Speed to you developers who choose to suffer with this any further.
- Sharepoint is great if you are going to use it OUT OF THE BOX ONLY,
otherwise SHAREPOINT IS A PIECE OF GARBAGE
- The object model has countless nuances to work around even for doing
simple tasks. There are 3000 poorly named variables for each object.
Half of them don't work as you'd expect so you find yourself either
copy/pasting previous code you've spent 3 weeks developing to add a
single list or you find yourself spending 3 weeks developing code from
scratch (1 week in the documentation, another 2 weeks on google trying
to find another poor soul that has dealt with the same issue).
- Aside from the “it’s a pain to work with factor”, it doesn’t even live
up to it’s intended purpose,
- I get paid doing this sharepoint crap and what a waste of corporate time
and money, I personally don’t care, f*ck my company and their like, but
if it were my corporation I would be upset to see my developers
building sharepoint based CMS. WTF, this thing is really useless crap.
- Once I got a look at SharePoint at the evil-empire, I thought how
typical of Microsoft to tout something that is not just a nightmare, but
ineffective
- The difference between wikis and sharepoint is that sharepoint sucks.
- If
SharePoint wasn't a Microsoft product, slim change anyone ever heard
about it. SharePoint is great on paper, but a horrible product for
developers and end users.
- The only people who like it, are people who never seen any other
product, and people who can make money from installing, designing and
updating it.
- My company believe it's a document control system. Huh! Nowhere near it
and definitely not 'out of the box'. A consultants dream to milk
unsuspecting users of the platform.
Absolute rubbish to use
- I've been at three companies where SharePoint was "implemented". Someone
set it up and expected developers and such to use it, but no one could
figure out the purpose of it, or how to navigate. At two of these
companies, MediaWiki was implemented and quickly took over most of what
SharePoint was trying to do (but then, we never could figure out what
SharePoint was for).
- t's true that no one would use SharePoint if Microsoft didn't bundle it
with corporate packages. This software is just crap.
- Developing SharePoint Web Parts and applications sucks. And we're not
even using all of the features of SharePoint (THANK GOD). After the
excitement and relief that came with .Net Framework with Visual Studio
it's like trading a perfume bath with horse crap.
- If you ever tried to clone Sharepoint, you know Sharepoint sucks.
If you ever tried using Sharepoint with anything else but IE and MS
Offie, you know Sharepoint sucks.
If you ever need to login as different users on Sharepoint, you know
Sharepoint sucks
- I was all happy about it until they said I had to convert it to
Sharepoint. I took a look at Sharepoint and I threw up in my mouth a
little. It’s the worst piece of crap there is. Like you said, it doesn’t
even do ajax right. It quite simply, sucks. There are way better
alternatives. But like you said, too bad corporate america is stuck on
that.
- It is bloatware, lacks efficiency, overly complex and simply mediocre. I
consider this an enterprise virus.
.
No, its not a balanced perspective but it does make interesting reading. It reads almost the opposite of the Lotus Notes discussion. Here we have a group of developers who hate the product they are using (with a passion) but they marvel at how Micro$oft have been so successful at selling it to their organizations.
.
Sources:
- Microsoft Sharepoint Sucks
- Sharepoint Sucks
- SharePoint Sucks - And Here's Why - Part 1
- Sharepoint Sucks - And Here's Why - Part 2
- Shiny Donkey: Blogs Schmogs
- What's Wrong With Sharepoint?
- Why Sharepoint Server is Terrible
- Wiki versus Sharepoint
- 8 Reasons Why Sharepoint Is Bad For Your Business
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Comments (7)
I hate Sharepoint with the passion of 10,000 burning Lotus Notes users ROFLMAO!
@Patrick. Not really. We were asked to consider adding it to one project but we were never able to figure out how to use it (or even why we would want to). At the time I assumed i was just plain dumb. But after reading the comments I think it might have been a good think we never could figure it out.
After the Celtics loss and USA blown soccer call this morning, finally a smile on my face.
Peter, thank you very much for that research.
I like the specificity of the complaints. At least we Notes developers complain about specific things like dragging an icon to another workspace page and going too far - you have to start all over again! How hard is is to drag it back? And how long has this been stupid?
@6 John. Good observation, I never noticed that. The dragging of icons I have noticed but yes, many of the complaints are about the totality of the products as an application development environment. I think if you are not committed to the product you don't see the value of fixing it. It would be rare to hear from the Notes development community that the entire product sucks. We all have a lot of opinions how many of the smaller things can be tweaked. We bother to raise those points because we care about the product, believe in it, and want to see it improved.