3 ms·

What's up with all the MS hate? This thread reads like a Slashdot thread and not an HN thread. Pardon me, I feel that the OP is not sincere. He already has a pr

What's up with all the MS hate? This thread reads like a Slashdot thread and not an HN thread. Pardon me, I feel that the OP is not sincere. He already has a preconceived notion (OP quote, 'it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain') about the product and wants to reinforce it. Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it, it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users. Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned. Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously. Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a little bit before you can start customizing the portal. Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer. If you have further questions, ask away.

DuncanIdaho 17y ago
Atlassian Confluence or whole Atlassian suite. Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better (office integration is obviously much better on SP). Also you can get pretty impressive Confluence/Sharepoint integration. Also if you're already using Domino platform in house - you could go the Lotus Connections + Quickr way - getting full Open Office (Symphony) integration. Both these solutions being much cheaper AND more extensible than SharePoint. Plus collaboration capabilities of Atlassian or IBM solutions being much better than SP's Don't get me wrong - I believe that SP is pretty good - just not for an IT company with tech savvy users - it would be probably better to look somewhere else.
- swombat 17y ago
  Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better Much better according to you. Not according to the hordes of non-geeks in large corporations, who don't even know that there are alternatives. Compared to sharing a spreadsheet by email or via a shared drive with no locking, Sharepoint is pretty good!
  - DuncanIdaho 17y ago
    Basically you're saying the same as me... We do have SP in our company, we also have lots of other stuff - we use JIRA for issue tracking for example. I also spent quite some time evaluating Confluence. And what I figured out was that getting to integrate whole of our infrastructure and different existing document repositories (they're all over the place technologically and physically) would be way easier and more flexible using Atlassian suite. That's because we work on so many different platforms (.Net, Domino, Java, Oracle, MSSQL,...). And since SP is very typical of MS software (great integration with anything MS - and other stuff does not exist) - for our situation an principal/technology agnostic system is much much better in the long run. But as far as non-geeks go in monolythic MS stack companies - ofcourse SP is AWESOME :)
- solutionyogi 17y ago
  I have no experience with Atlassian products but I would like to note that for Atlassian install version, you need to have J2EE application server which could be a deal breaker for an MS shop. Second, what about extensibility? Does Atlassian provide a way to customize the installation?
  - JanezStupar 17y ago
    I don't understand why installing an Tomcat on Windows could be a deal breaker? As far as extenisbility goes... There are loads of plugins available for free. Giving you an ability to extend your Wiki with social oriented features, different UI customisations, you get remote API, you can add widgets (they are going to make the Shindig an integral part of Confluence) or embed whole pages. If you want to pay a reasonable price you can buy payable plugins: Gliffy, Sharepoint Connector, Balsamiq,... Did I mention that Atlassian products stack together super nicely (being able to view your JIRA issues on documentation pages in wiki is superb). Using the stack mentioned above will basically give you all the tools you need for all your documentation creation and collaboration needs costing you about 10.000$ for a 500 man company. From what I've seen so far it's the Atlassian that are driving the whole WEB 2.0 Enterprise collaboration game - with IBM and MS trying to follow - but Atlassian is just too fast so far IMHO. And I don't even work for Atlassian :)
netsp 17y ago
Crappy is certainly a preconceived notion, but 'what does it actually do?' is valid criticism/complaint. Read over these comments. It seems to be pretty hard to explain clearly.
mstevens 17y ago
I'm sceptical about the claims that the version control is completely transparent. Certainly when I was using it I found it an utter pain and persistently had problems with documents being in the wrong state. I don't have access to a sharepoint installation anymore or I'd look for a closer idea of what I found difficult.
rgrieselhuber 17y ago
Just out of curiosity, do you work for Microsoft or one of their partners?
- solutionyogi 17y ago
  No, I do not work for Microsoft or do Sharepoint consulting for a living. As I wrote in my post, I have used Sharepoint Intranet at my last project and found it to be a very useful software. I have no experience in sourcing/customizing/deploying Sharepoint, I am strictly speaking as an end user.
  - rgrieselhuber 17y ago
    Thanks for clarifying.
- anamax 17y ago
  "Just out of curiosity" suggests some randomness in that sort of question, randomness that we don't see in the asking. Why not own up to your reasons for asking the question?

DuncanIdaho 17y ago

Atlassian Confluence or whole Atlassian suite. Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better (office integration is obviously much better on SP). Also you can get pretty impressive Confluence/Sharepoint integration. Also if you're already using Domino platform in house - you could go the Lotus Connections + Quickr way - getting full Open Office (Symphony) integration. Both these solutions being much cheaper AND more extensible than SharePoint. Plus collaboration capabilities of Atlassian or IBM solutions being much better than SP's Don't get me wrong - I believe that SP is pretty good - just not for an IT company with tech savvy users - it would be probably better to look somewhere else.

swombat 17y ago
Which does most of the stuff done by SharePoint much better Much better according to you. Not according to the hordes of non-geeks in large corporations, who don't even know that there are alternatives. Compared to sharing a spreadsheet by email or via a shared drive with no locking, Sharepoint is pretty good!
- DuncanIdaho 17y ago
  Basically you're saying the same as me... We do have SP in our company, we also have lots of other stuff - we use JIRA for issue tracking for example. I also spent quite some time evaluating Confluence. And what I figured out was that getting to integrate whole of our infrastructure and different existing document repositories (they're all over the place technologically and physically) would be way easier and more flexible using Atlassian suite. That's because we work on so many different platforms (.Net, Domino, Java, Oracle, MSSQL,...). And since SP is very typical of MS software (great integration with anything MS - and other stuff does not exist) - for our situation an principal/technology agnostic system is much much better in the long run. But as far as non-geeks go in monolythic MS stack companies - ofcourse SP is AWESOME :)
solutionyogi 17y ago
I have no experience with Atlassian products but I would like to note that for Atlassian install version, you need to have J2EE application server which could be a deal breaker for an MS shop. Second, what about extensibility? Does Atlassian provide a way to customize the installation?
- JanezStupar 17y ago
  I don't understand why installing an Tomcat on Windows could be a deal breaker? As far as extenisbility goes... There are loads of plugins available for free. Giving you an ability to extend your Wiki with social oriented features, different UI customisations, you get remote API, you can add widgets (they are going to make the Shindig an integral part of Confluence) or embed whole pages. If you want to pay a reasonable price you can buy payable plugins: Gliffy, Sharepoint Connector, Balsamiq,... Did I mention that Atlassian products stack together super nicely (being able to view your JIRA issues on documentation pages in wiki is superb). Using the stack mentioned above will basically give you all the tools you need for all your documentation creation and collaboration needs costing you about 10.000$ for a 500 man company. From what I've seen so far it's the Atlassian that are driving the whole WEB 2.0 Enterprise collaboration game - with IBM and MS trying to follow - but Atlassian is just too fast so far IMHO. And I don't even work for Atlassian :)

netsp 17y ago

Crappy is certainly a preconceived notion, but 'what does it actually do?' is valid criticism/complaint. Read over these comments. It seems to be pretty hard to explain clearly.

mstevens 17y ago

I'm sceptical about the claims that the version control is completely transparent. Certainly when I was using it I found it an utter pain and persistently had problems with documents being in the wrong state. I don't have access to a sharepoint installation anymore or I'd look for a closer idea of what I found difficult.

rgrieselhuber 17y ago

Just out of curiosity, do you work for Microsoft or one of their partners?

solutionyogi 17y ago
No, I do not work for Microsoft or do Sharepoint consulting for a living. As I wrote in my post, I have used Sharepoint Intranet at my last project and found it to be a very useful software. I have no experience in sourcing/customizing/deploying Sharepoint, I am strictly speaking as an end user.
- rgrieselhuber 17y ago
  Thanks for clarifying.
anamax 17y ago
"Just out of curiosity" suggests some randomness in that sort of question, randomness that we don't see in the asking. Why not own up to your reasons for asking the question?