An interesting thread and one that resonates with my experiences.
A past 13-years Domino developer, probably the only one remaining fan in an organisation with 12000 Notes "seats", and who misses the loss *enormously*, I am now a SharePoint (2007, soon to be 2010) team leader. I have witnessed ignorance and misunderstanding buzzing around Notes like an unwelcome "act of air turbulence" since I started working with it in version 4. My users' most common complaint (client apps at the time) were about either the UI or the *icons*. Yes, the ICONS. Rarely about the fact that a) it was secure, b) it was distributed to dedicated teams c) it took a few weeks to develop, secure, distribute and replicate across cross sites or b) it JUST BLOODY WORKED.
And yet, having developed in SharePoint for about 18 months, and starting reading SP blogs like I used to read Codestore daily (sadly no more), the success of this juggernaut has surprised me. It is, as some of the posts in this thread allude, *very* flaky. You getting that problem? Oh you need service pack 2. Or hotfix Q47TFGGY. That'll do it. You don't want to code that method that way, cos that API call is being deprecated in the next release. And that bit of code won't work cos MS are ditching it next year. 2 Domino servers to do all that? You'll need 8 in MS. Minimum. I've never known a product as resource demanding, unreliable and technically *worrying* as SharePoint.
"Worrying", as it's getting installed all over the place. It's the next big thing. Why? The trojan horse called WSS - the free component of Windows server OS. And they're doing the same with the just released SP 2010. And how I hope (and I am about to find out) that things are fixed; improved; smoother. That there are fewer "dead bodies" (an insider MS terminology to describe known bugs that are swept under the carpet due to time pressures before gold releases) for us to find (and I *have* found a couple of corpses).
I hope things are less "make sure you leave the curly braces out there cos it crashes the solution" and more about focusing on what the customer wants. They don't and shouldn't care what it's running on (after all any app is only as good as its developers, and I was surprised at Jeff's tweet recently (http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/10717179885)). SharePoint 2007 to me at least, felt like it took MS by surprise. That they didn't expect its success; that they didn't anticipate the demand that the free WSS introduced. I say this because:
- bin folders named after the previous developer corporation
- known errors about asynchronous events which, an MVP once told me, JUST DON'T WORK
- the pissing about with XML hacking and SPDisposeCheck utilities to look for memory-leak-risky code (SP is not fully managed code)
- the fear that "well it works on my dev box" "well it doesn't on mine" "well our dev boxes are clones!!" doesn't cut it with the business
- application pools turning off randomly
- colleagues who have long since accepted the traits and "it's a SharePoint thing" and are past my stage, known as "rage". (Denial, rage, acceptance I think are the 3 stages of SharePoint development)
- the fact that, damnit, this "development as hacker" stuff should have stopped 10 years ago. Not in 2010.
And yet the blogs out there enthuse like it's never been done before. Notes 2.x - that poster was right. Quickplace as well. Some of this stuff is not new. Just BETTER MARKETED. Oh, and prettier-bloody-icons.
Yet, and this is big one with me, MS never have really embraced backwards compatibility. It's rip and replace, and it's frightening when you have live data out there. Notes? I've still got v3 nsfs running, ticking along, with the sound of BIRDSONG. And yet it was disliked, mistrusted and ostracised. Ignorance. "It's not Microsoft." Both with users, and MS developers. LotusScript? Micky Mouse. Formula code? Not a proper language. Fine, it's not OO, but give you and I a set task and start that stopwatch.
For a SharePoint 2003 -> 2007 "migration", one course attendee had such a bad experience in his organisation, that he wiped the servers down, blitzed the content, and started again. To a Domino developer, laughable. I could go on, but it's late!.
Despite this shower of bile, I do have exciting ideas about SharePoint. There *are* things I have seen and liked. There's some huge potential if done right. And the support on forums and blogs is quite something.
Also, the underlying .NET platform does afford a massive cross-scope of development opportunities (workflow foundation, WPF, WCF, Biztalk, SharePoint designer, Silverlight, SQL backend, publishing frameworks, EDRMS, Excel services, Access services, Visio services, Search management, etc. etc.). Just expect customers to sit tight, cos it's not getting done as quick as it might have used to be.
As I have said elsewhere, SP is immature, temperamental but, for all of us to realise, also massive and massively important. Good luck Jake, I'll move your RSS feed from my Notes folder to my SharePoint folder now...
An interesting thread and one that resonates with my experiences.
A past 13-years Domino developer, probably the only one remaining fan in an organisation with 12000 Notes "seats", and who misses the loss *enormously*, I am now a SharePoint (2007, soon to be 2010) team leader. I have witnessed ignorance and misunderstanding buzzing around Notes like an unwelcome "act of air turbulence" since I started working with it in version 4. My users' most common complaint (client apps at the time) were about either the UI or the *icons*. Yes, the ICONS. Rarely about the fact that a) it was secure, b) it was distributed to dedicated teams c) it took a few weeks to develop, secure, distribute and replicate across cross sites or b) it JUST BLOODY WORKED.
And yet, having developed in SharePoint for about 18 months, and starting reading SP blogs like I used to read Codestore daily (sadly no more), the success of this juggernaut has surprised me. It is, as some of the posts in this thread allude, *very* flaky. You getting that problem? Oh you need service pack 2. Or hotfix Q47TFGGY. That'll do it. You don't want to code that method that way, cos that API call is being deprecated in the next release. And that bit of code won't work cos MS are ditching it next year. 2 Domino servers to do all that? You'll need 8 in MS. Minimum. I've never known a product as resource demanding, unreliable and technically *worrying* as SharePoint.
"Worrying", as it's getting installed all over the place. It's the next big thing. Why? The trojan horse called WSS - the free component of Windows server OS. And they're doing the same with the just released SP 2010. And how I hope (and I am about to find out) that things are fixed; improved; smoother. That there are fewer "dead bodies" (an insider MS terminology to describe known bugs that are swept under the carpet due to time pressures before gold releases) for us to find (and I *have* found a couple of corpses).
I hope things are less "make sure you leave the curly braces out there cos it crashes the solution" and more about focusing on what the customer wants. They don't and shouldn't care what it's running on (after all any app is only as good as its developers, and I was surprised at Jeff's tweet recently (http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/10717179885)). SharePoint 2007 to me at least, felt like it took MS by surprise. That they didn't expect its success; that they didn't anticipate the demand that the free WSS introduced. I say this because:
- bin folders named after the previous developer corporation
- known errors about asynchronous events which, an MVP once told me, JUST DON'T WORK
- the pissing about with XML hacking and SPDisposeCheck utilities to look for memory-leak-risky code (SP is not fully managed code)
- the fear that "well it works on my dev box" "well it doesn't on mine" "well our dev boxes are clones!!" doesn't cut it with the business
- application pools turning off randomly
- colleagues who have long since accepted the traits and "it's a SharePoint thing" and are past my stage, known as "rage". (Denial, rage, acceptance I think are the 3 stages of SharePoint development)
- the fact that, damnit, this "development as hacker" stuff should have stopped 10 years ago. Not in 2010.
And yet the blogs out there enthuse like it's never been done before. Notes 2.x - that poster was right. Quickplace as well. Some of this stuff is not new. Just BETTER MARKETED. Oh, and prettier-bloody-icons.
Yet, and this is big one with me, MS never have really embraced backwards compatibility. It's rip and replace, and it's frightening when you have live data out there. Notes? I've still got v3 nsfs running, ticking along, with the sound of BIRDSONG. And yet it was disliked, mistrusted and ostracised. Ignorance. "It's not Microsoft." Both with users, and MS developers. LotusScript? Micky Mouse. Formula code? Not a proper language. Fine, it's not OO, but give you and I a set task and start that stopwatch.
For a SharePoint 2003 -> 2007 "migration", one course attendee had such a bad experience in his organisation, that he wiped the servers down, blitzed the content, and started again. To a Domino developer, laughable. I could go on, but it's late!.
Despite this shower of bile, I do have exciting ideas about SharePoint. There *are* things I have seen and liked. There's some huge potential if done right. And the support on forums and blogs is quite something.
Also, the underlying .NET platform does afford a massive cross-scope of development opportunities (workflow foundation, WPF, WCF, Biztalk, SharePoint designer, Silverlight, SQL backend, publishing frameworks, EDRMS, Excel services, Access services, Visio services, Search management, etc. etc.). Just expect customers to sit tight, cos it's not getting done as quick as it might have used to be.
As I have said elsewhere, SP is immature, temperamental but, for all of us to realise, also massive and massively important. Good luck Jake, I'll move your RSS feed from my Notes folder to my SharePoint folder now...
Andrew