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    • Doug Finner
    • Posted on Wed 9 Jun 2010 11:08 AM

    SharePoint is a mess.

    Muph is spot on...

    Note - I worked briefly with SP about 1-2 years back; ymmv and I could be wrong. These were some of my takeaway points.

    It's a collection of many MS tools cobbled together to try and be something for everyone. None of the bits really interact properly. Change one, everything breaks. New versions are mystery boxes that nobody understands.

    The web site details live inside the SQL server db and the site is rendered up from the db (ala the way Apple's iPhoto works). As far as I can tell, this even includes the css stuff. The intent appears to provide a controlled front end for 99% of the users; users set config information, that's written into the db which then handles the actual code work in the background. How the site is actually rendered remained a mystery.

    Some basic workflow is included with the product but if you want to do anything interesting, you need the full up workflow engine (name escapes me now). User rights are managed in conjunction with AD. As I recall, if you want to manage security outside of AD, it gets interesting real fast.

    If you want to drive yourself batty, add in Project Server rev latest...we hired a consultant, he had no clue, we gave up...

    I refer you back to the Notes dude who had to migrate Notes to SP for some interesting discussion of the process.

    http://migratenotes.wordpress.com/

    I do like the doc collaboration features; everyone in the universe uses MS Office and SP provides a nice way for teams to collaborate on doc authoring. If this isn't controlled, it can get pretty crazy fast; everyone sets up a 'My site' and offers up collaborative environments and suddenly, you have no clue where 'docX' lives. It would be similar to giving every employee a Notes designer client and rights to add dbs to the server. Many companies don't get this but until the system is out of control.

    Since everything is in one db, searching for items is relatively easy, but the number of hits can be overwhelming making the feature less than useful.

    OK, out of steam...back to work

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