6 ms·

Does SharePoint destroy intranet design? (2010)

open-source-ux 4y ago
Related: A free guide on the usability of intranet design: Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences-real-life-projects/ https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences... A small usability lapse: no publication date on the page, or in the report (presumably intentional). The report states: "The research for this report was done in 2013, but the majority of the advice may still be applicable today, because people and principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does."
- mcswell 4y ago
  "...principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does." Tell that to the UX people. New, refreshed, clean, round corners, and a bunch more buzzwords.
codevark 4y ago
ics 4y ago
Might as well post this here because I don’t see Sharepoint discussed here often. I love-hate Sharepoint. I love that lists have brought colleagues into really considering how to store, manipulate, present data in a way that’s more rich than a spreadsheet with clever formatting. At my work we set up a Sharepoint site for each project, ostensibly to manage documents but I see it as a way to create project-as-an-app, where constraints and workflows can be built with minimal effort and used without special tools, just a good mind for data interfaces. Not without its headaches for sure, but I would be very disappointed to lose its power as a non-developer who still wrangles lots of information. What I wonder is what alternatives are out there, open source or otherwise which are similarly flexible? Airtable seems similar for some situations but opinionated. FileMaker feels pretty niche and quite expensive to host. What draws me to Sharepoint Lists is that it feels like a backend and fronted at the same time, so it’s easy to experiment with near instant feedback.
- prepend 4y ago
  I don’t like SharePoint lists very much because they are hard to work with outside of SharePoint. I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Compare it to airtable as far as usability. I’d rather just store data untyped in json and use it with anything.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is the reality - people are so burned into "file based" thinking that anything outside it really hurts their brains. Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
    - prepend 4y ago
      For me, it’s that SharePoint is so bad, I’d rather be file based than use it for data management. PowerPoint and even word works pretty well. But data sucks on SharePoint.
  - ics 4y ago
    Everything Sharepoint is kludgy once you try to step outside it’s domain. I was surprised recently that Power Automate has a built in JSON parser, but CSV is by a third party. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s overly onerous if getting things into JSON or a spreadsheet are all you need. Very common for people building Power BI dashboards, or using the list to construct API queries to other systems. Weird example, but you can build what is effectively a DSL, so users can create queries and workflows just by creating list items with the available options, which can then be translated into code. “Stupid Sharepoint Tricks” but it’s nice because they’re self documenting, come with authoring history and access control, and doesn’t seem scary to some users.
  - gompertz 4y ago
    I have to ask this here... Because I have the same annoyance with SharePoint Lists. While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
Sharepoint deployments that don't take into consideration actual user needs might, but isn't that true of anything?
running101 4y ago
In short, yes
at_a_remove 4y ago
My Sharepoint experience can be distilled into a few lessons: First, if you do not have a "webmaster" (a person who has authority to delete things, to tell people to "knock that shit off," and whose job it is to regularly patrol this content), you can and will end up with an endless mess of duplicates, partially-constructed sites, Potempkin villages where a traveler might foolishly expect content, and swollen archives of irrelevant data jammed in as a backup. Second, people invariably notice workflows and they have the brilliant idea that they can attempt to automate a lot of paper-pushing. This is almost true, and only becomes completely true if they hire someone who is a Sharepoint admin, with real chops. Now, administration will not want to invest in another FTE, so they will instead attempt to hire someone who is half a Sharepoint admin, and half something else, usually whatever their current needs are. This is akin to laying out job listings for part-time brain surgeons who are also world-class detectives when they're not playing musical venues; Buckaroo Banzai never answers this particular call, and you get left with some clunky, badly-implemented workflows. Third, you must have someone else responsible for hosting, backup, and upgrade of Sharepoint. You're not doing upgrades often enough for you to be good at it. Similarly, backups and restores ought to be left to the people who are into that kind of thing. See #2. Fourth, as much as you would like a clean separation between intranet and extranet, you will invariably get "requests" from Important People that such and such from some other organization have access and can collaborate with some of your other internal intranet users (which ought to be redundant but now is not). You must recognize this from the beginning and plan accordingly.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You forgot the part where even though you carefully do NOT use Sharepoint at all, it turns out Teams uses Sharepoint as the backend store for "files" and now you have a mass of files in Sharepoint you didn't even expect.
  - yokoprime 4y ago
    Where would you rather see Teams store files? SharePoint is at least a known factor. Some esoteric new backend for files in Teams doesn't make sense. I really don't see the issue with SharePoint file storage once you've accepted the adoption of Teams. You can turn off file handling all together in teams, which it sounds like you should have done.
grumblepeet 4y ago
Well considering this article is 12 years old it shouldn’t be used as a definitive description or narrative on SharePoint for intranets today. The whole platform was rebuilt a few years ago and runs on React now. That doesn’t mean I think SharePoint is a best of breed internet, far from it, but if you have licenses for m365 already then not using it is a waste really.
yokoprime 4y ago
This article is very outdated, and SharePoint has come a long way since it was written. Is it amazing and lets you create the most exciting designs? Nope. But its not "destroying" intranet design
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Exactly. Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge%27s%20law%20of%20headlines%20is%20an%20adage%20that%20states%3A%20%22Any%20headline%20that%20ends%20in%20a%20question%20mark%20can%20be%20answered%20by%20the%20word%20no.%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... It would be as sensible to ask, "Do CMSs Destroy Internet Design?" If you're building a custom CMS for your company intranet instead of using SharePoint, a wiki, Notion or whatever, you're doing it wrong.
PinkMilkshake 4y ago
I've created a bunch of flows that log information from forms into lists, track submissions, move files around, etc. It's been very useful. But I still struggle to understand SharePoint. I've survived by maintaining a well-organized bookmarks folder. I'm never the person holding up a meeting while trying to find that important document in some SharePoint maze.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Amen, preach it! But I suppose that's true of any filing system that I didn't create.
danielodievich 4y ago
Wow SharePoint on HN! That doesn't happen a lot. I was at Microsoft in the group called MCS which stood for Microsoft Consulting Services during the 3rd release of Sharepoint, the one that finally found market fit and was abbreviated MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services) and we joked that M in MCS stood for MOSS because it sold like crazy and many of us in the field had crazy busy times supporting major implementations. I was amazing at SharePoint, but I am very, very happy that I moved on and hopefully will never have to touch it again. It is an amazingly extensible product that was very often a victim of that exact extensibility. I saw an intranet at Cisco that was build on some monstrous IBM software and it was impossible to navigate. And I saw Confluence based intranets that are quite nice. You get what you put into it. If you build a nice knowledge hierarchy and have librarians/content owners, you'll get a fine intranet regardless of software. If you don't, you won't.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  MOSS, now that's an acronym I haven't heard in nearly a decade and a half. I worked on that product at Microsoft 2004-9.
  - mcswell 4y ago
    Now we know why the Rolling Stone Magazine doesn't use Sharepoint.
- trinix912 4y ago
  > some monstrous IBM software and it was impossible to navigate Was it Lotus Notes by any chance?
  - danielodievich 4y ago
    It was not Lotus... but it was something else! Information structure was arbitrary. Lots of content migrated into it from old CEC sites without any pruning/management. Very sensitive to the timeouts of logon tokens. Very inconsistent at needing or not needing an employee VPN. BRRR. I am just getting grossed out thinking about it now.
petilon 4y ago
Serious question: Does anyone use SharePoint these days? We use Teams and OneDrive (and SharePoint is underneath both) but no one I know uses SharePoint itself. If you do use SharePoint what do you find valuable about it?
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  At my employer we use Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Our migration was basically: Personal folders on a network drive -> OneDrive Shared folders on a network drive -> SharePoint sites In-person meetings -> Teams video meetings Desk phone calls -> Teams calls 1 billion one-line emails -> Teams chat With a few exceptions we don’t much use the “Teams” part of Teams. It was clearly modeled after Facebook-style “wall posts” with comments, and, well, no one uses Facebook anymore either.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  My company still uses locally hosted SharePoint and I am grateful that I am not the one who has to administer it because it is a nightmare kludge. I cannot even tell you what we use it for anymore, other than storing certain files that should really not be stored there but are for legacy reasons. Anything I personally had to use it for has since been merged into our internally developed system to much rejoicing.
- Sateeshm 4y ago
  It's pretty good for internal apps. I wrote a lot of fully custom internal apps using SharePoint. Written in Svelte, hosted on SharePoint site and - lists, workflows, and API as backend.
socialismisok 4y ago
SharePoint is a product that appears to have a ton of useful features, but seems to take great pride in making them as unpleasant and difficult to use as possible. It's fundamental ideas are great, but building anything with it becomes a nightmare of xml and non standard tooling with confusing lingo.
ultrasounder 4y ago
just discovered this GEM of a post. Hilarious comments by mr_toad and faeriechangling. Also learnt about Potemkin villages(had to GTS after I read this thread!). Overall completely echo all the comments. Sharepoint based automation is NOT for the faint hearted. Though power automate does offer some glimpse into the glorious future of Sharepoint.

Related: A free guide on the usability of intranet design: Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences-real-life-projects/ https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences... A small usability lapse: no publication date on the page, or in the report (presumably intentional). The report states: "The research for this report was done in 2013, but the majority of the advice may still be applicable today, because people and principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does."

mcswell 4y ago
"...principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does." Tell that to the UX people. New, refreshed, clean, round corners, and a bunch more buzzwords.

codevark 4y ago

ics 4y ago

Might as well post this here because I don’t see Sharepoint discussed here often. I love-hate Sharepoint. I love that lists have brought colleagues into really considering how to store, manipulate, present data in a way that’s more rich than a spreadsheet with clever formatting. At my work we set up a Sharepoint site for each project, ostensibly to manage documents but I see it as a way to create project-as-an-app, where constraints and workflows can be built with minimal effort and used without special tools, just a good mind for data interfaces. Not without its headaches for sure, but I would be very disappointed to lose its power as a non-developer who still wrangles lots of information. What I wonder is what alternatives are out there, open source or otherwise which are similarly flexible? Airtable seems similar for some situations but opinionated. FileMaker feels pretty niche and quite expensive to host. What draws me to Sharepoint Lists is that it feels like a backend and fronted at the same time, so it’s easy to experiment with near instant feedback.

prepend 4y ago
I don’t like SharePoint lists very much because they are hard to work with outside of SharePoint. I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Compare it to airtable as far as usability. I’d rather just store data untyped in json and use it with anything.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the reality - people are so burned into "file based" thinking that anything outside it really hurts their brains. Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
  - prepend 4y ago
    For me, it’s that SharePoint is so bad, I’d rather be file based than use it for data management. PowerPoint and even word works pretty well. But data sucks on SharePoint.
- ics 4y ago
  Everything Sharepoint is kludgy once you try to step outside it’s domain. I was surprised recently that Power Automate has a built in JSON parser, but CSV is by a third party. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s overly onerous if getting things into JSON or a spreadsheet are all you need. Very common for people building Power BI dashboards, or using the list to construct API queries to other systems. Weird example, but you can build what is effectively a DSL, so users can create queries and workflows just by creating list items with the available options, which can then be translated into code. “Stupid Sharepoint Tricks” but it’s nice because they’re self documenting, come with authoring history and access control, and doesn’t seem scary to some users.
- gompertz 4y ago
  I have to ask this here... Because I have the same annoyance with SharePoint Lists. While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

Sharepoint deployments that don't take into consideration actual user needs might, but isn't that true of anything?

running101 4y ago

In short, yes

at_a_remove 4y ago

My Sharepoint experience can be distilled into a few lessons: First, if you do not have a "webmaster" (a person who has authority to delete things, to tell people to "knock that shit off," and whose job it is to regularly patrol this content), you can and will end up with an endless mess of duplicates, partially-constructed sites, Potempkin villages where a traveler might foolishly expect content, and swollen archives of irrelevant data jammed in as a backup. Second, people invariably notice workflows and they have the brilliant idea that they can attempt to automate a lot of paper-pushing. This is almost true, and only becomes completely true if they hire someone who is a Sharepoint admin, with real chops. Now, administration will not want to invest in another FTE, so they will instead attempt to hire someone who is half a Sharepoint admin, and half something else, usually whatever their current needs are. This is akin to laying out job listings for part-time brain surgeons who are also world-class detectives when they're not playing musical venues; Buckaroo Banzai never answers this particular call, and you get left with some clunky, badly-implemented workflows. Third, you must have someone else responsible for hosting, backup, and upgrade of Sharepoint. You're not doing upgrades often enough for you to be good at it. Similarly, backups and restores ought to be left to the people who are into that kind of thing. See #2. Fourth, as much as you would like a clean separation between intranet and extranet, you will invariably get "requests" from Important People that such and such from some other organization have access and can collaborate with some of your other internal intranet users (which ought to be redundant but now is not). You must recognize this from the beginning and plan accordingly.

bombcar 4y ago
You forgot the part where even though you carefully do NOT use Sharepoint at all, it turns out Teams uses Sharepoint as the backend store for "files" and now you have a mass of files in Sharepoint you didn't even expect.
- yokoprime 4y ago
  Where would you rather see Teams store files? SharePoint is at least a known factor. Some esoteric new backend for files in Teams doesn't make sense. I really don't see the issue with SharePoint file storage once you've accepted the adoption of Teams. You can turn off file handling all together in teams, which it sounds like you should have done.

grumblepeet 4y ago

Well considering this article is 12 years old it shouldn’t be used as a definitive description or narrative on SharePoint for intranets today. The whole platform was rebuilt a few years ago and runs on React now. That doesn’t mean I think SharePoint is a best of breed internet, far from it, but if you have licenses for m365 already then not using it is a waste really.

yokoprime 4y ago

This article is very outdated, and SharePoint has come a long way since it was written. Is it amazing and lets you create the most exciting designs? Nope. But its not "destroying" intranet design

CharlesW 4y ago
Exactly. Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge%27s%20law%20of%20headlines%20is%20an%20adage%20that%20states%3A%20%22Any%20headline%20that%20ends%20in%20a%20question%20mark%20can%20be%20answered%20by%20the%20word%20no.%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... It would be as sensible to ask, "Do CMSs Destroy Internet Design?" If you're building a custom CMS for your company intranet instead of using SharePoint, a wiki, Notion or whatever, you're doing it wrong.

PinkMilkshake 4y ago

I've created a bunch of flows that log information from forms into lists, track submissions, move files around, etc. It's been very useful. But I still struggle to understand SharePoint. I've survived by maintaining a well-organized bookmarks folder. I'm never the person holding up a meeting while trying to find that important document in some SharePoint maze.

mcswell 4y ago
Amen, preach it! But I suppose that's true of any filing system that I didn't create.

danielodievich 4y ago

Wow SharePoint on HN! That doesn't happen a lot. I was at Microsoft in the group called MCS which stood for Microsoft Consulting Services during the 3rd release of Sharepoint, the one that finally found market fit and was abbreviated MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services) and we joked that M in MCS stood for MOSS because it sold like crazy and many of us in the field had crazy busy times supporting major implementations. I was amazing at SharePoint, but I am very, very happy that I moved on and hopefully will never have to touch it again. It is an amazingly extensible product that was very often a victim of that exact extensibility. I saw an intranet at Cisco that was build on some monstrous IBM software and it was impossible to navigate. And I saw Confluence based intranets that are quite nice. You get what you put into it. If you build a nice knowledge hierarchy and have librarians/content owners, you'll get a fine intranet regardless of software. If you don't, you won't.

umeshunni 4y ago
MOSS, now that's an acronym I haven't heard in nearly a decade and a half. I worked on that product at Microsoft 2004-9.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Now we know why the Rolling Stone Magazine doesn't use Sharepoint.
trinix912 4y ago
> some monstrous IBM software and it was impossible to navigate Was it Lotus Notes by any chance?
- danielodievich 4y ago
  It was not Lotus... but it was something else! Information structure was arbitrary. Lots of content migrated into it from old CEC sites without any pruning/management. Very sensitive to the timeouts of logon tokens. Very inconsistent at needing or not needing an employee VPN. BRRR. I am just getting grossed out thinking about it now.

petilon 4y ago

Serious question: Does anyone use SharePoint these days? We use Teams and OneDrive (and SharePoint is underneath both) but no one I know uses SharePoint itself. If you do use SharePoint what do you find valuable about it?

snowwrestler 4y ago
At my employer we use Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Our migration was basically: Personal folders on a network drive -> OneDrive Shared folders on a network drive -> SharePoint sites In-person meetings -> Teams video meetings Desk phone calls -> Teams calls 1 billion one-line emails -> Teams chat With a few exceptions we don’t much use the “Teams” part of Teams. It was clearly modeled after Facebook-style “wall posts” with comments, and, well, no one uses Facebook anymore either.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
My company still uses locally hosted SharePoint and I am grateful that I am not the one who has to administer it because it is a nightmare kludge. I cannot even tell you what we use it for anymore, other than storing certain files that should really not be stored there but are for legacy reasons. Anything I personally had to use it for has since been merged into our internally developed system to much rejoicing.
Sateeshm 4y ago
It's pretty good for internal apps. I wrote a lot of fully custom internal apps using SharePoint. Written in Svelte, hosted on SharePoint site and - lists, workflows, and API as backend.

socialismisok 4y ago

SharePoint is a product that appears to have a ton of useful features, but seems to take great pride in making them as unpleasant and difficult to use as possible. It's fundamental ideas are great, but building anything with it becomes a nightmare of xml and non standard tooling with confusing lingo.

ultrasounder 4y ago

just discovered this GEM of a post. Hilarious comments by mr_toad and faeriechangling. Also learnt about Potemkin villages(had to GTS after I read this thread!). Overall completely echo all the comments. Sharepoint based automation is NOT for the faint hearted. Though power automate does offer some glimpse into the glorious future of Sharepoint.