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Cracking Open the SharePoint Fortress
dreemteem writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK:"SharePoint is a brilliant success, for a couple of reasons. In a way, it's Microsoft's answer to GNU/Linux: cheap and simple enough for departments to install without needing to ask permission, it has proliferated almost unnoticed through enterprises to such an extent that last year SharePoint Sales were $1.3 billion. But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits, it has one other key characteristic, hinted at in the Wikipedia entry above: it offers an effortless way for people to put content into the system, but makes it very hard to get it out because of its proprietary lock-in. This makes it a very real threat to open source. For example, all of the gains made in the field of open document standards — notably with ODF — are nullified if a company's content is trapped inside SharePoint." The article offers a slice of hope for getting around that, though, in the form of a new API for Google Sites which can slurp the data back out.
How is this story "hardware" related.
In times of financial troubles, companies look to alternatives but they need to be trusted known brands
Uhh, which Wikipedia entry above?
So... in order to break the microsoft lockin you use an api that is only availible to google users only.
Sound a bit like "Free, More Free and Locked in... Again..." to me...
I should put it on some machine that I don't even own at google?
The MS hatred can really make you dumb.
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository. Don't even start me of Infopath documents being put in there to pretend to give it a forms engine. Its hell.
Thing is, I'm not entirely sure why all the myriad sharepoint sites that have sprung up at our company are so useless, I think its because its so easy to drop another document into another list that you end up with a sprawl of almost-related data, that's then impossible to find. Our admin did try to say that he'd put the search functionality on so it should be easier to find things... but when I searched for one document I received several thousand hits back!
Alternatively it could be because every department has their own sharepoint site, that no-one knows which one to look in for data, so they don't bother using it.
In any case, all the sharepoints here are crap, even the one the admin spent a lot of time on to give it a good sense of organisation.
It's also good news if you like competition. Now you've at least got an option to switch, which puts some pressure on Microsoft. And if Google can do this, someone else could, too.
This isn't "good vs evil." It's "choice vs no choice." And it looks like choice just scored a point.
SharePoint is neither Cheap nor Simple
It requires considerably more iron to run it than Wiki software, and the software licenses are very expensive.
We invested initially in Sharepoint, but can't afford to roll it out for the entire company.
Cheap is the last word I'd use to describe Sharepoint.
Depending on how and what you use Sharepoint for, companies should consider looking at MediaWiki and/or Alfresco for document storage, indexing, processing, sharing, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is such an awful piece of software, especially for people who use a non-IE browser, essentially making this even more worthless for non Windows desktops. I'm asked for my security credentials every other click or so, and even when it is correct, sometimes it will just keep asking and asking (and yes, in Firefox I added the url to my network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris). The wiki software is just atrocious with the syntax being completely unintuitive. The only way to really use the wiki is... yep, to use IE and the built in rich text editor. Just check out some of the code generated from it:
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A>
<div align=center><strong><font size=4>Welcome to My Group wiki site!</font></strong></div><strong><font size=3></font></strong></div>
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A><strong><font size=3></font></strong> </div>
<div class=ExternalClassD18714056AE54C4288E018C6231AEF4A>
<div align=left><font size=3></font><font size=2>Welcome to the Department Wiki. Remember, this is your wiki, so please don't hesitate to add and/or enhance existing pages, and fix mistakes or errors.</font></div><font size=2></font></div><br>
<h1><font size=5>Starting Points</font></h1>
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Getting content out of SharePoint is blindingly trivial - the web services provided allow you to access all saved versions of documents in document libraries (including wiki pages et al), all user information and all list items.
Grab the information from the web services and do whatever you wish with the resulting data - its neither hard nor hidden, so this story is pointless.
It's actually quite trivial - and getting more so to move your data out of google apps.
See the recent 'data liberation' things they've been doing.
This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light. I suspect that google will have their own lock-in however.
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense? Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in. The reason: when that solution is no longer the best/most painless/cheapest you will have a hell trying to change it. It's about risk and assessment, and you can put whatever label you want on it, be it Google, Microsoft or Joe's Software. There are other options. Options that try to keep you as a customer by being the best, instead of holding your data hostage. How is this difficult to anyone?
I am the lawn!
Even if google were only being proposed as a bridge to other formats it's just too much trust to ask for sensitive and classified documents to be moved through servers at a company we don't control.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
We have Share Point here at my office but my team doesn't use it because it is so hard to navigate. It is extremely difficult to figure out where you just posted something if you happen to stumble back to the main landing page. I'm shocked to hear that anyone considers that package a "success". I, for one, will not be giving up on any OS tools / apps for SP.
FUD much?
Part of the point of SharePoint is actually getting the documents back out of SharePoint, it works pretty much the exact same way people put documents into SharePoint.
There is no mass export, sure, but show me the OSS alternative that exports things en masse to SharePoint ...
The argument that you can get at the data because the source is there is fucking retarded. To 99.999% of the people in the world having the source doesn't mean a thing so you're going to need a new battle cry if you expect people to give a shit.
This type of article is just a copy of the crap that MS does, you won't when people over that way.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Gmail supports imap. Google Calender supports iCal. Google Docs exports natively to OpenDocument. GTalk uses Jabber and Jingle. Google Chrome is open source, as is Google Wave, Android, and plenty of other things I can't remember offhand.
I haven't really seen that much in terms of lock-in from Google, beyond the fact that they often provide the best implementation -- for example, I don't see how you could lock someone into a search engine, yet Google Search remains dominant because it's actually good.
Can you give me your reason for believing Google would lock people in? Any evidence to back that up?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
What is this lock in? I RTFA and skimmed the linked wikipedia article, and couldn't find any details.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Documents are also in the database as binary objects. Pulling them out and saving to the local file system can be an exercise for your intern or first year programmer.
The API for SharePoint is fairly well documented. If you wanted to migrate a site from SharePoint to another platform, recreating the look and feel may be a challenge--likely depending on your design skills--but getting your data out will not be.
Can only say one thing to this: http://www.dataliberation.org/
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
I'm not following. Where did I say that I'm using Google's proprietary products?
I am the lawn!
Not that hard to reverse engineer the schema.
This fellow has open sourced a tool to crack it open:
http://blog.dreamdevil.com/index.php/2007/03/13/sharepoint_2003_database_exporter/
Back in the day before Sharepoint, as a school assignment for one of my higher level CIS Classes I was tasked with making a CMS where as people could upload (Word) documents to the CMS in the form of Articles.
The closest I was ever able to get is with an an application called GeekLog. But there was absolutely no automation. I tinkered with the HTML export aspect of Word, it was an absolute abortion. Useless with Geeklog.
Now that we have linkable libraries for everything under the sun in Linux, I always wondered the following: Why could it not be setup such that so long as an Acceptable format was uploaded (DOC, ODT, WPD, etc) could be parsed into an XHTML 1.0 Compliant article.
I never could lick that problem.
Then another problem came up. I needed a way to Authenticate Geeklog against LDAP, and later single sign on with Kerberos.
I was thinking this all the way back in 2003 and 2004.
Then, low and behold, I start hearing about the abomination that is: Sharepoint.
After I heard about I was like "oh damn it. They got write what all these LAMP Stack PHP applications couldn't think of: LDAP, Kerberos, and the ability to turn binary documents into readable searchable articles."
It was like my worst nightmare come true. GeekLog was a prime example of how Linux developers could have stopped the sharepoint nightmare before it started.
Isn't the Data Liberation group the same group that kidnapped Patty Hearst?
WAAAAHHH!!!!
Microsoft is making something that people like.
WAAAAHHH!!!!
I'll admit Sharepoint is a success when it works with browsers other than IE. After evangelising the benefits of alternative browsers around our company, I looked distinctly silly when we started rolling out Sharepoint and had to admit everyone had to revert back to IE.
I would also warn people against believing Microsoft's hype about Sharepoint. It's a good tool for a specific purpose, but it won't solve every problem you have. Make sure YOUR company is suitable for the way Sharepoint works. Don't expect Sharepoint to be flexible to your requirements.
The impression I got from just the crap summary was that Sharepoint is idiot easy to install without any planning. This means depending on the individual who sets it up, it'll either work wonderfully for you by enforcing proper tagging and indexing rules or it'll become a pit that simply costs money because you can't find anything important with it.
This is a classic example of Pick any two:
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
There are a lot of organizations that, while sharepoint isn't necessarily the "best answer", it is the only solution that allows for a quick deployment.
U.S. Government organizations and their contractors would never be allowed to store documents anywhere except within their own infrastructure. I would love to see a "Google Sites" internal deployment option...
Google sends in G-Force Soldiersâ and foils Microsoft's evil Plans. Once again, the day is saved, thanks to... the power puff girls! -- And Google.
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
There's a difference between using proprietary products and being locked in to proprietary products. If you use a proprietary mail server (for example) that stores its spools in maildir format and implements IMAP and SMTP, then you are not locked in because you can replace it with an (open or proprietary) alternative easily.
Google makes it easy to extract your data and put it somewhere else. Sharepoint does not. That means that you are not locked in to Google's products if you choose to use them, while you are if you use Sharepoint. It's not about Microsoft being intrinsically evil and Google being intrinsically good, it's about the relative difficulty in ditching either of them in the future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Cheap? No. Not unless you call $150 per CAL cheap.
I used the technique below to get all my list data out. It's pretty easy to extend that to pull out the document blobs from SQL as well:
http://solitarysoftwareguy.blogspot.com/
All the worlds indeed a
Having worked with SharePoint for many years, I do not see how the data is locked in. The documents can be accessed much like a network share. The list data (including the meta data associated with documents) can be exported to Excel or even accessed through web services or through the object model itself.
And I don't see how it is an explicit threat to ODF because end users can easily store any document type in SharePoint. The only threat is that SharePoint offers integration with Office - but that doesn't prevent people from using ODF, it just encourages usage of Office.
I'm not suggesting that SharePoint is a good platform, but let's not bash it for locking users in and locking out competing products when it is merely retaining users by being just good enough to keep them content.
a "Document Operating System".
creation science book
Isn't the Data Liberation group the same group that kidnapped Patty Hearst?
Data wants to be free! People? Not so much.
Someone close to me works for a very large firm. He was implemeting an internal Wiki, which quickly turned also into some kind of doc repository, based on OSS software (don't know which, sorry). The Wiki was being used by about 10 small departments, with good prospects for more use.
MS got wind of it, and paid the devs+consultants required to move the whole thing over to SharePoint, which does offer a few short-term superficial benefits.
End result: for a few man-months of investment, MS is set to get a lifetime rent. Well played MS !
Posting anonymously because the whole shenanigans were heavily NDAed.
"But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits" huh? who says? im not even going to bother googling the stats on that one, but since ive never heard of SharePoint before, sounds like a bad marketing ploy to me..
I work with SharePoint on a daily base. I also looked into Google Sites.
...)
I encourage alternatives and open solutions like Google Sites (Alfresco,
Unfortunately the current state of Google Sites does not even contain 20% of the functionality and flexibility available in SharePoint. (read: coding flexibility and integration flexibility, I'm not talking about locked in documents)
I'm afraid that with the SharePoint 2010 version (due for in Q1 2010 ) the gap will only grow larger.
You have to use MSIE to do most operations. The "version control" is based on the "brand new in 1972" lock paradigm. There is no API that I've been able to discover, and no way to automate things using VBScript. There is no way to xfer, much less sync, my Outlook "Tasks" with "Tasks" on sharepoint.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Or at least *copy* the data out of google apps, which is still way better than a lock-in, of course.
O3Spaces
Lenya
SugardCRM
Alfresco
Main pyrus
Nuxeo
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
No, when you jump to Microsoft's defense you're jumping to Microsoft's defense. The article was about letting you migrate data out of Sharepoint using a free tool provided by Google. That means you have a way to move things out of Sharepoint if you want, not that you're forced to move off of SharePoint and use Google. This means you have a choice as opposed to no choice. Whatever you think about MS or Google as companies does not matter to whether or not having choice is a good thing. The fact that Google provided the choice means they did something good for users, even if they did so for selfish reasons.
In response to this article you wrote, "This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light." That demonstrates a specific bias. An analogy would be an article that says John Smith opened up an auto shop downtown so now there are two shops. You can go to Bob Johnsons's auto body as everyone has been or you can go to the new shop. And then you reply, "This is great news if you believe that Bob Johnson is pure evil and John Smith is goodness and light." That's a clear bias.
Uhm.. Seriously? You are really kidding me.. I mean REALLY? It is not any of those things boasted--not remotely close. I worked with Sharepoint for the last two years, installing, administering, and using for a state university. It is absolutely the most unrecommendable software product I have EVER worked with. It has worked reasonably well (not great) only for one purpose for us: a document repository. Version control only really works when using Microsoft Office 2007. Otherwise, it'll wipe out your version histories.
(1) Ease of installation -- It's highly complex. You really do need to read the 700 page book Microsoft has to know how to install it. This is because numerous options at install time cannot be changed later except by re-installation. And I mean many numerous options that are very difficult to understand how each relates to the other.. We reinstalled so many times, paid for expensive consulting both with Microsoft and with an outside firm. We still couldn't get it right. The nuances are many and hit you repeatedly often with the only fix being a reinstallation.... and usually rebuilding of content, along with it.
AND users almost universally hate it. Management fights hard against the wishes of users to implement Sharepoint--not only at our organisation but also at every other organisation I've had to privilege to ask their sysadmins about. Management usually hails its success but on the ground, it's almost universally hated and a disaster. Oh, yes.. Our universities library system also had a successful use of a simple trouble ticket management system... so there were two exceptions. It's also easier to install and administer as a single server than as a farm, but still not so easy and no easier on users.
I cannot stress enough--the problem with Sharepoint are the many many MANY critical nuances.
(2) Inexpensive -- No. It's very expensive. The learning curve is quite high so training is really required. In our case, the expense was bundled in with a variety of other software licenses such as that for Exchange. Alone, the license is very expensive--particularly if you want to open it up to outside your organisation's intranet.
But the real expense is in administration. Both training costs, immense amounts of time spent with it, and dealing with problems ongoing are the highest costs I've ever seen for a server application. Upgrades are also a huge difficulty. They present as opportunities to resolve some former configuration problems but taking advantage thereof often means your data is not restorable.
Of all the alternative applications I've worked with, "Typo 3" is the most Sharepoint-like, functionally. It is, however, far easier to learn and it is reliable. Sharepoint is reliable only in the sense that its processes keep running--that doesn't mean it doesn't break regularly. The best general purpose CMS I have worked with is definitely Drupal. Drupal lacks some of the capabilities of Sharepoint (presuming those capabilities were actually usable in Sharepoint in any meaningful sense) but has many others.
The problem is that Sharepoint is not exactly a CMS. It is (and I am speaking in theory--not practice in practical terms) a collaboration environment. There really is a difference. Drupal itself has a learning curve that I don't like. It's more administrator focused and not user focused, as manifested by the fact that you cannot edit things were they are seen by users but rather must work through a back panel. Drupal also lacks a WebDAV document repository and the ability to do things like email in documents and other kinds of content and get email notifications of content or documents modified.
Drupal is about setting up a classical website for users to use and administrators to administer. Sharepoint (in theory) is about providing a service where users can create their own sites, document and data repositories and means of presenting and sharing the same (via tags and filters). It's about working together within an or
You know, I thought the community would have picked up on this about three years ago when Sharepoint was first getting attention. Microsoft has done something brilliant with Sharepoint: they've managed to tie each of their server and client pieces together in such a way that Sharepoint is the conduit for the information exchange. Want to share MS Project files? Get Sharepoint. Want to have BI reporting or workflows in Dynamics GP? Get Sharepoint. Want to have a Microsoft CRM dashboard? Get Sharepoint. All of this is functionality that should be built into the core products, not a centralized system requiring separate licensing. Sharepoint is the evil glue that is starting to hold things together. I think other proprietary vendors need to wake up and seriously consider whether or not it's worth integrating with this evil beast. Sharepoint locks you very tightly to Microsoft's platforms and it also sets you on a road toward having upgrade difficulties due to how tightly the software is coupled. All in all, it may be too little, too late. Sharepoint is very quickly gaining traction.
----- obSig
Sharepoint and Google Docs are different Animals and people tend not to understand that. Microsoft does not run Sharepoint, they sell you Sharepoint and you install it on Windows Servers internally. You can't install Google Docs on your own servers.
there are a few applications that come close to Sharepoint in the Linux world, like GeekLog and Knowlege tree, but in the Linux world, there is the parasite of unnecessary duplication. Everyone wants to store authentication on MySQL servers. (I'm not knocking MySQL, its excellent for so many beloved tasks, just not authentication.) But thats a square peg for a round hole.
Only a clueless moron would use sharepoint.
This is complete FUD to hype a crappy new code project.
SharePoint has a robust web service AND .net API. All data in lists and document libraries is available very web services extremely easily, in fact there are even converter services to provide it in other formats in some cases.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479390.aspx
The main (legitimate) reason most people actually put things in SharePoint, is because it provides a reliable way to programatically access your data (Even at the field level) -- as opposed to having it all shoved in a file system somewhere.
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository.
So true. The search capability makes share point useless to me as a CMS. I put in a search term and end up with a thousand results, none of which is at all relevant to the question I'm trying to answer.
If you look at deploying MS-Sharepoint, you'll find that you need to have MS-ActiveDirectory, and hence, MS-Windows PCs and CALs. Sharepoint deployments are usually $25K+ for anything beyond a trivial lab deployment.
OTOH, http://www.alfresco.com/ provides similar DMS and CMS capabilities. You can use the free version very easily or pay a $3k for support. It can connect to any LDAP for authentication and authorization. There are no CALs. Alfresco was created by former EMC/Documentum people - they understand document management.
I'm just a CIO that deployed the free Alfresco in our company over a year ago. Besides that, I have no other affiliation.
FUD.
Choice is a point it already had with Sharepoint. I work a lot with content management systems (sadly), many reports (particularly Gartner) suggest using SharePoint as a front end and something else as the back end for your content storage - and strongly recommend AGAINST using Sharepoint for a content server/storage role. I know where I work (and several other places) use Oracle Universal Content Server to store the data, and SharePoint only when working on it (you could probably integrate just as easily with Drupal or some other content storage system). Getting the content out of these is often easy. In Oracle Universal Content Server, I can use the archiving tool to generate an archive, and then write a simple script in most scripting languages to toss the files into a directory structure that is more end-user friendly, or parse the data for use in importing into another content server.
If you don't know how to use your product, then don't complain about it lacking a feature that it actually has.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
There's an actual Read/Write API. It isn't hard. There is no story. Don't be dumb.
Excellent, well thought out review. Where's the mod points???
After I heard about I was like "oh damn it. They got write what all these LAMP Stack PHP applications couldn't think of: LDAP, Kerberos, and the ability to turn binary documents into readable searchable articles."
My gut feeling is there are some details missing. LDAP and Kerberos are not interdependent. Especially for web applications. However, in Microsoft's world, it is.
This suggests you were trying, like *many* before and after you, to connect a LAMP stack with a Microsoft identity stack. Microsoft makes this intentionally difficult, so there should be little surprise that it's an epic fail.
GeekLog was a prime example of how Linux developers could have stopped the sharepoint nightmare before it started.
If it was that simple, Microsoft would have been in the has-been ranks populated by Novell a long time ago.
Microsoft drowns out competing platforms and even their own developer-base when the market is big enough roughly in this order.
1. They bring consistently inferior product to market, then spend their way into the market segment. The disconnect here is that their core market is where the purchasing manager is totally disconnected from IT. That is most big IT shops.
2. Microsoft AND the executive class who bought the license blames IT for bungling the deployment.
Microsoft wins!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Microsoft announced some months ago a new collaboration platform. It is based in formats that can fully be used by other vendors (and open source) systems, can be accessed by any standards compliant browser, and the data is stored in a way that you can port it fully to alternate solutions without losing anything. That day, the Microsoft spokesman told us that the next day, April 2, they will disclose pricing and availability.
Google makes it easy to extract your data and put it somewhere else.
Usually.
Yes, SharePoint integrates with office. Surprise! But, you aren't locked in. No, SharePoint doesn't trap anything. SharePoint out-of-the-box, is o.k. To make it USEFUL, you extend it with features. Features can be purchased or developed. One such add on is StoragePoint that allows all the BLOB storage to be moved to the file system, other DB's, other CMS, etc.
The common answer to the lack of a feature in an OSS project is, "Well, write it yourself." If you need a feature in SharePoint that isn't available OOTB, or COTS, you can...surprise, write it yourself.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
While I agree Sharepoint is an abombination, when I've had the misfortune to interact with it (usually, I've needed to do so with various scripts), I found you can actually NET USE Sharepoint as if it were just a normal CIFS drive, and access everything as files.
I don't see what's difficult about getting your documents out again in bulk.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
They wanted to set up an IT wiki for information sharing (procedures, config info, etc) and were told that a LAMP/WAMP stack with Wikimedia was unacceptable because it was insecure. They tried SharePoint and found that it didn't allow structuring documents or anything remotely resembling the flexibility of ?AMP/Wiki and eventually replaced it with a closed-source system requiring annual licensing and a dedicated developer.
Her boss finally left, a more flexible one came in, and now all of their old servers have been replaced with *nix with a growing rollout of PostgreSQL and life is much happier there.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
With the APIs, Web Services and other ways to access SharePoint, it is the farthest thing from locking you in. Just like any application, it takes planning to get an implementation to be successfull. That planning has to be company wide, not just IT. Most problems I have seen, have to do with lack of planning and training of the end users.
We have done integration with ADAM, Oracle, MySql and other applications. You are not tied into it any more than you are with any application you spend time on developing for.
My 2 cents.
im not even going to bother googling the stats on that one, but since ive never heard of SharePoint before...
The SharePoint primer for the clueless and lazy:
Microsoft has sold more than 100 million seat licenses since 2001
and is on track to generate $1 billion in SharePoint-related revenue this year.
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
General Mills, a longtime SharePoint user, is replacing all its file sharing systems with SharePoint and has begun using it for blogs and wikis, and to automate some workflows. The maker of Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, and 100 other food brands counts 20,000 active SharePoint users, with more than 1,500 people contributing content on a regular basis.
Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling? [Nov 1, 2008]
But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits
SharePoint is a $1.3 billion dollar a year hit.
How often do you expect to see numbers like that in this business?
We use sharepoint at work as a repository for documentation. While I am not enamored that it is proprietary, I do think it is intuitive and useful. I haven't found that our data is trapped inside sharepoint. I can easily extract the data and move it elsewhere. The article is a bit vague.
I can only concurr at a lower (user) level. Sharepoint is a tool that isn't totally unsuitable for the various tasks it uis used for, but far from perfect.
I have used Sharepoint on several recent jobs as it has replaces several open-source type systems from Wikis or whatever. I have been working at sites where they can spend serious money on online document management but have 'bought' Sharepoint. Getting the security working correctly was a problem (multiple domains). It performs like a dead dog, especially on large documents and whilst user friendly, that isn't very relevant due to the lack of performance.
See my journal, I write things there
Sharepoint was being described as Microsoft's latest and greatest lock-in product almost as soon as it was announced; certainly before it was officially released. Beside most tech industry writers, who on earth didn't see this coming? Oh, yeah, that's right: the majority of IT managers in Fortune 500 companies. Complain away guys. The tech guys down in the trenches -- the ones you've been ignoring for years now -- could have told you this would happen.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
U.S. Bank picks IBM's Lotus platform over Microsoft's SharePoint
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138020/U.S._Bank_picks_IBM_s_Lotus_platform_over_Microsoft_s_SharePoint
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
The same thing that happens in most rollouts of software, and the problem that prevents or holds up successful rollouts, is proper modelling and governance.
People are saying Sharepoint is terrible (OH NOES!!!111!). What's the alternative? Vignette sucks. Websphere costs an arm and a leg and isn't much better. And then there are other products like Documentum (EMC's horrendous product that is now trying to become a super Sharepoint plugin), or the many other 'nonames' that float around.
So what's the problem folks? For what it is, Sharepoint is pretty good. I'm not saying it's the "bees knees" either, but at the same time it has quite a bit of power, it's easy to use, and oddly enough -- easy to get completely out of control if it's not properly governed and laid out.
See, we spent about a year designing a model (partly due to time restrictions, partly due to politics) that would work with us to ensure it wouldn't grow out of control (the biggest problem with enterprise SP deployments) and a plan to migrate our existing content in oddly enough -- another propriety format, which is Lotus Notes databases (total crap).
We've managed to recreate a multitude of applications in a quarter of the amount of time it took to write them in Notes. It's available to everybody in the company, and deployment is simple because it's to the frontend. Sure, you can write a web application from the ground up to re-do the same things and make your notes app, or desktop app into a web app. But you'll waste time, and you'll waste money.
Now like I said, SP isn't perfect, but it's REALLY cheap, and REALLY good for the price. Vignette cost us about $100k for our implementation, plus 6 figure development costs. Sharepoint is less than half that, and we are more productive. We all use MS Office here too, so there's an easy addition to it.
If you are an open source advocate (I'm not necessarily) then I suppose SP is a horrible solution. But it's your data. If it becomes "proprietary" it's because you're doing it wrong. Most of our lookups are from SQL or Oracle, and SP presents us an application that can interact with the data. It's OUR DATA.
The article is FUD, and inaccurate. Your data only becomes "locked in" if you are doing it wrong. If you do it right, your data is relatively independent (unless you actually USE Infopath forms -- which we do) and even then -- it's not "locked in", it's just in a format that you would have used ANYWAY. Imagine that if you upload a Word document, now it's only accessible as a Word document in Sharepoint! Try uploading an ODF format document though -- it's still an ODF when you retrieve it.
You silly Slashdotters believe anything that has an MS bias... news for nerds? Only *nix nerds.
I keep warning the ones with the budgets that sourcesafe is a nightmare when it falls over... but so far, they only care that it's still running... and that backups are taken nightly...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This isn't "good vs evil." It's "choice vs no choice." And it looks like choice just scored a point.
In fact, "choice vs no choice" is "good vs evil." ... On a whole lot of different levels, for slum-dwellers as well as computer content producers.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
Bottom line is: avoid proprietary lock-in.
So then why are you using Google's proprietary products then?
Google makes it easy to extract your data and put it somewhere else. Sharepoint does not.
The only problem I can see with your statement is that it is completely wrong.
Getting data or files out of SharePoint is dead simple. Aside from a large number of client choices including Windows Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Access, and SharePoint Designer you can create custom interfaces. If you want to create your own interfaces, there is a well documented Web Services API, a well documented RPC API, and over course a set of components if the custom code is running on the server.
The Office apps cost money, but Windows Explorer is Windows, SharePoint Designer is free, and the only things that would stop you from using the programmatic interfaces would be a decision to them to harden security or a lack of knowledge.
Our glorious IT department, guys who just happen to jump to ANYTHING Microsoft releases, moved our intranet to Sharepoint some 6-7 months ago. We are a 1000 man high tech company, producing our own safety critical hardware and software used in civilian and military applications. We have a full-time, large IT department, so we are not just a mom&dad shop who don't know how to turn on the computer.
:-)
Here is our experience with Sharepoint:
- It's SLOW AS HELL. It is mind-blowingly, unbelievably slow. I have NEVER seen such a slow system in my life!
- The search function is un-useable, except for poking fun at results. Rating hits in some xls Documents higher than hits on wiki pages - COME ON, MICROSOFT, EVEN YOU CAN'T BE THAT STUPID!
- Collaboration? Yeah, right - 2 guys from my department worked with 2 other guys in 2 other departments on a document. After 3 days, the damn thing just swallowed the document! No way to roll back, no way to find it (IT also gave up after a few hours of search). It's GONE!
- The WIKI functionality (editor) is awful. Just awful. It changes the spacing between lines at its' liking. No way to fix it, short of turning to HTML mode and repairing it manually, just to see it f*** up again after the next update!
I could go on forever, but I guess you get the picture. MS sure does have some fine products, although I despise their business practice. Sharepoint, however, is NOT one of those fine ones!
OK, I calmed down. Now I go back to work...
Has anyone actually tried to use this Sharepoint Export tool? I browsed around Google's Sites API pages but I can't seem to find any new tool or reference to SharePoint. They have nice import/export tool for Sites (http://code.google.com/p/google-sites-liberation/) but I don't see anything for SharePoint. Am I missing something?
Google will solve all your problems. Anything Microsoft can get you to pay for, Google does better, and for free. Don't believe me? Try to pay Google for gmail. You can't, huh? They won't take your money! It's no good here!! Imagine that!!!
After working on SharePoint for a year, I can honestly say that the documentation was a pile of dung. Development was only possible by accident, because often obvious functionality was undocumented or had so little detail that the only way to figure out what the options would do was to try them all. And SharePoint functions have a lot of options.
I don't know about your sharepoint comments, but you're wrong about most everything you said about Drupal. You should have asked me for help.
http://drupal.org/project/webdav
http://drupal.org/project/notify
Also, I don't know what you mean by
as manifested by the fact that you cannot edit things were they are seen by users but rather must work through a back panel.
You click the edit tab, which gives you direct access to edit the page. I don't know how much more direct you want. It's kind of a logical fallacy to say "edit things [as] seen by users". Users cannot edit, therefore you cannot edit *and* see things the way the user would.
"... it's eating disk space."
I'm guessing that, due to the way it constructs its servers, Google has lots of disk space. Each server has its own hard drive. The smallest hard drives have larger and larger capacity. As old servers are replaced with more energy-efficient servers, the hard drives are replaced, also.
I'm not sure if the parent is being sarcastic, but I can pay for gmail by paying for Google Apps. Something that's being advertised very heavily recently.
Every since I have developed and worked on sharepoint I have started to charge any company that wants me to do anything for sharepoint $200 dollars a hour. They always asks me why, and it is simple... SHAREPOINT SUCKS. It is the worst platform I have ever had to develop for. Its not user friendly, its not developer friendly it just plain out a piece of CRAP. Debugging is crap, attach it to a w3wpe.exe or whatever it is called to debug the software only to have your variables go null due to timeout. Customizing the look and feel of sharepoint is a headache and half itself. Horribly done CSS and MasterPages. It took me 10 hours just to change the color scheme. Dont get me started on sharepoint List which are ridiculous and the use of CAML queries. Then there is the problems with the GUID and adding all customized code into the GAC which was utterly stupid when you have multiple sharepoint websites running. Just creating a external Database and attaching it to Sharepoint took me 1 week to do. The best part was the people that were my superiors, they didnt know shit about programming. I was looking over my superiors code and it was full of inefficiency and brute force algorithms. Sure it worked but I have not seen that ridiculous amount of code since entry level Computer Science. I got into argument with one them asking them about how come a piece of code did not sort the Sharepoint list first then merge them together (Merge Sort) but instead merged one piece at a time then sorted the list. After said he did not know what Big-O was I knew that my superiors did not know shit about coding. Dont even get me started on coding for Infopath or using Relational Theory Correctly. Oh yes by the way. ANDREW CONNELLY YOU ARE A DUMBASS. SHAREPOINT IS CRAP. SHAREPOINT IS EQUIVALENT TO THE FAD OF HAVING A PET ROCK.
SharePoint is a PITA, and we wouldn't use it if we didn't use a commercial product that happens to require it. That having been said, its relatively easy to get content back out of SharePoint via web service or using the .NET API's.
there are so many free solutions. tikiwiki beats sharepoint in most aspects, especially with the new workspaces feature comming in v4.0. couple that with some other solutions like horde, or some other online solution and you've achieved more, than you ever could with sharepoint.
Anyone too stupid to realise that the WHOLE POINT of SharePoint was always total lock-in, deserves what they get.
you had me at #!
what? how did this get to the front page with that crap? Do you have idea what you're evening writing about?
MS has done some good things over the years but Sharepoint is not one of those things. It's about as much fun as taking a dump in your pants in public.
In future posts, I will work on my sarcasm, which can apparently be so sarcastic as to appear not to be sarcastic at all. :)
Why not make the same choice as the Irish government and kill off Sharepoint and switch to the open source Plone instead. A complete list of all Irish sites are here: Government and related websites, both Plone and non-Plone.
Disclaimer: I consulted for them on this project.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
I was charged with setting up an installation of Windows Sharepoint Services (The free as in beer version of Sharepoint. We spent $0 to get the Sharepoint part of the solution) with something called "Knowledgelake Capture Server" riding on the top. I was pushing for an open source management system but management felt more comfortable with this solution. I am not affiliated with Knowledgelake in any way but basically it allows us to put a barcode on the front page of a stack of documents and scan them to a network share. Knowledgelake grabs the barcode, hits our MRP system and grabs some Metadata, and files it in a Sharepoint Document library where you can search for the documents by any piece of Metadata (Example: Customer ID, Order ID, Customer Name, Date). The company I am at used to have absolute ridiculous numbers of filing cabinets to keep all these documents. Now we do not save any of that paperwork. It is a heck of a lot quicker than manually filing it and has been a lifesaver.
Getting Data out? You can access all the metadata as well as links to the documents which are simply stored in web folders. I am reasonably sure that I could migrate all of this stuff to a database and write my own little web front end in a relatively short period of time.
Sharepoint isn't a great product and I wouldn't recommended actually buying Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, but with the right goals and right third party software you can probably accomplish some decent things.
If you want to check out an Open Source application that is well on the way to being a Sharepoint killer check out SilverStripe.
http://silverstripe.org/
Lots of plugins and extensions already, available for all three platforms (Linux, MacOS, and Microsoft) and yet still under active development. :o)
Its actually a website CMS, but many of the extensions effectively make it much more than merely a _very_ easy-to-use CMS. :o)
I don't think you understand lock in. It doesn't mean "data is locked in and unaccessable" it means "forced to use one vendors product".
"Getting data or files out of SharePoint is dead simple. Aside from a large number of client choices including Windows Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Access, and SharePoint Designer ..."
Surprise, all these you mention are Microsoft products => lock in.
The APIs used by all of those are public and their are plenty of third party products that use them. And, you can always use the Web services API.
I can see why you posted as AC, because the idea that someone would see using Microsoft SharePoint as a downside because the easiest way get their stuff out with Windows Explorer is just silly. If they are running Windows Servers I doubt they have an issue with using a Windows client to get the files out if they want to move them elsewhere... Not much of a lock in.
All sharepoint content is accessible though WebDAV, which is how you "mount" a sharepoint document store to a client. We've used WebDAV as a Sharepoint integration mechanism for years. And there's always the possibility getting at the DB layer directly, which supports ANSI SQL better than any DB except Postgres. The schema is as sensible as you can reasonably expect from a system that allows users to define their own table structures.
"Lock-in" for Sharepoint data is very low on my list of concerns. Stability and DR for Sharepoint server farms on the other hand....