Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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/
It's an MS web based document management system with CMS capabilties (among other things). Most organizations use it for intranet type sites, but there are many companies that use it to manage their public facing websites as well.
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/
Sharepoint is a piece of collaboration based software that Microsoft developed. People can jointly work on documents or data stored on the server, and manage the security within their own niches. The design is primarily to give groups or projects their own space, and then give a lot of control over what happens there to the group leader.
While CMS features were mentioned by another user, they are almost an afterthought or byproduct of the other features, rather than the main purpose of this software. It also happens to SUCK for content management, and it's recommended you get another back end content server to store your Sharepoint managed or created data long term.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).