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I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'

by eitally 11y ago

I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform and offers a lot of pretty spiffy bells & whistles when correctly configured. None of the open source options remotely compare.

tacos 11y ago
SharePoint lets you glue together a lot of business process with (gasp) paid software. Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. And somewhere in Burbank there's a couple production companies happy to pay them $1200/seat each for ten people instead of hiring a bunch of devs to rig up or whittle down some open source stuff. Unsurprisingly, the open source crowd neither likes nor understands this tradeoff. SharePoint is sort of a mess, but it's precisely the kind of mess that WordPress is: it's big and dumb and breaks predictably and people know how to deal with it.
- dkrich 11y ago
  Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. Sharepoint's bread and butter is in Fortune-500 companies' IT departments that use Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard software because they are not in the business of risk. Software is a resource, just like the buildings those companies occupy and the people they employ. It helps them meet a business objective. They do not care what developers think makes them most productive. They care what will minimize IT training and support costs and what will be around in ten years. That is why companies that make their livings off of enterprise sales design their software for C-level execs and IT decision-makers, not low-level developers. It's also why most in-house enterprise software is written in Java and not Ruby. So the point is that, just like for Apple with the 2012 MBP, there is money to be made from those who are risk-averse and see more cost in moving to a new platform than from sticking with what already works. Somewhere there emerged an assumption that no developers understand that there are real P&L driving business decisions underlying the crappy software they are forced to use. I think most people get that, but that the software sucks to use is still an opinion shared by most of the people who use it for hours a day.
  - tacos 11y ago
    It's not just the Fortune 500. That currently cuts off with United Rentals at #500 with 12,000 employees. Lots of small 50+ employee companies use SharePoint. It often works even better for them: they can solve problems by dumbly plucking software out of a catalog and clumsily grow their business processes around best-practices implied by that software. In some future marco.org universe you can apt-get an entire business infrastructure and it all works great provided your MacBooks weigh 1.7 pounds instead of 2.3 with a 220dpi screen instead of 135. In the meantime, small companies tend to be full of people who haven't figured out what the heck they're doing yet and being able to buy an HR application makes a lot more sense than hiring 6 Ruby devs who 1) know nothing about HR 2) don't care about HR and 3) can't learn about HR or even gather specs because the person in charge is the owner's dumb son who doesn't know much about HR yet either.
dkrich 11y ago
I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform You seem to have just agreed with me. The Sharepoint vs. open source argument is a straw-man, since I never once mentioned open source. Sharepoint is used by all manner of organization for all manner of tasks. I just recently ran into an organization using it as a CMS platform. Past teams I've been on have used it as a document sharing platform, but even that experience is far from ideal. Sharepoint is used because enterprises are not in the risk business when it comes to software procurement. But for document review and sharing there are a host of better options available. Very few small teams that I've worked on that had their own control over what software they used chose to use Sharepoint of their own volition. Take that as you will.
- eitally 11y ago
  Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding. I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.

by eitally 11y ago

tacos 11y ago

SharePoint lets you glue together a lot of business process with (gasp) paid software. Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. And somewhere in Burbank there's a couple production companies happy to pay them $1200/seat each for ten people instead of hiring a bunch of devs to rig up or whittle down some open source stuff. Unsurprisingly, the open source crowd neither likes nor understands this tradeoff. SharePoint is sort of a mess, but it's precisely the kind of mess that WordPress is: it's big and dumb and breaks predictably and people know how to deal with it.

dkrich 11y ago
Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. Sharepoint's bread and butter is in Fortune-500 companies' IT departments that use Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard software because they are not in the business of risk. Software is a resource, just like the buildings those companies occupy and the people they employ. It helps them meet a business objective. They do not care what developers think makes them most productive. They care what will minimize IT training and support costs and what will be around in ten years. That is why companies that make their livings off of enterprise sales design their software for C-level execs and IT decision-makers, not low-level developers. It's also why most in-house enterprise software is written in Java and not Ruby. So the point is that, just like for Apple with the 2012 MBP, there is money to be made from those who are risk-averse and see more cost in moving to a new platform than from sticking with what already works. Somewhere there emerged an assumption that no developers understand that there are real P&L driving business decisions underlying the crappy software they are forced to use. I think most people get that, but that the software sucks to use is still an opinion shared by most of the people who use it for hours a day.
- tacos 11y ago
  It's not just the Fortune 500. That currently cuts off with United Rentals at #500 with 12,000 employees. Lots of small 50+ employee companies use SharePoint. It often works even better for them: they can solve problems by dumbly plucking software out of a catalog and clumsily grow their business processes around best-practices implied by that software. In some future marco.org universe you can apt-get an entire business infrastructure and it all works great provided your MacBooks weigh 1.7 pounds instead of 2.3 with a 220dpi screen instead of 135. In the meantime, small companies tend to be full of people who haven't figured out what the heck they're doing yet and being able to buy an HR application makes a lot more sense than hiring 6 Ruby devs who 1) know nothing about HR 2) don't care about HR and 3) can't learn about HR or even gather specs because the person in charge is the owner's dumb son who doesn't know much about HR yet either.

dkrich 11y ago

I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform You seem to have just agreed with me. The Sharepoint vs. open source argument is a straw-man, since I never once mentioned open source. Sharepoint is used by all manner of organization for all manner of tasks. I just recently ran into an organization using it as a CMS platform. Past teams I've been on have used it as a document sharing platform, but even that experience is far from ideal. Sharepoint is used because enterprises are not in the risk business when it comes to software procurement. But for document review and sharing there are a host of better options available. Very few small teams that I've worked on that had their own control over what software they used chose to use Sharepoint of their own volition. Take that as you will.

eitally 11y ago
Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding. I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.