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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 peo
by 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 agoYou 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 agoWhere 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.
- bombcar 4y agoIt's not a bad place, and it works decently well, but for people not expecting it it can be surprising.
- WorldMaker 4y agoAlso getting into that duplicate SharePoints sites discussion: groups in Teams already create SharePoint sites and you can customize those somewhat, but sometimes groups still want "their own" site with a nicer URL or slightly different customization than the auto-ones that Teams creates or don't realize there is an auto-one and go on to request their own duplicate site. I don't know if it is Teams or SharePoint that needs to get better at explaining what group sites already exist to help avoid duplicates.
- Hello71 4y agoOneDrive for Business is also SharePoint, and Teams is also Exchange (sort of)
- Spooky23 4y agoLeveraging SharePoint was essential to getting the product to market. SharePoint sucks, but has stuff like eDiscovery that is absolutely essential. End of the day, SharePoint is cheaper than a file server as you get a file solution a MVP discovery solution, and a MVP workflow engine that is good enough to get started, but lousy enough to sell Dynamics or PowerWhatever.