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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.
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.
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.
Don't even start me of Infopath documents being put in there to pretend to give it a forms engine. Its hell.
Worse than hell, really... and not very secure. Our purchase req's at work use it, and I doubt the doc author would know what I was talking about if I asked her whether she sanitized her inputs or not (for example, I can give my own PR's authorization all the way to the VP of finance if I wanted to... and they rely on the damned thing now).
As for the rest? Dude, I'd give it every mod point I'd ever see for the next year if I could. I'm guessing it's your latter reason (too much diaspora, with little to hold it together) that explains why few people use it. A good web designer can overcome that very easily, but unfortunately? A good web designer and a good SharePoint developer are apparently almost never the same human being (hell, our SP "developer" gets lost in an Event Log... how am I supposed to help explain the basics of CSS to the guy?)
PS: The search function is pure hell to get working right, if at all. The consultant who put ours together actually knew what he was doing, and SP search still works only half-assed, so don't feel too badly about it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yeah but google gets to read it after you extract it. I would rather have my company trade secrets in my company.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
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.
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I think it depends on what flavor of SharePoint you are using. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) is licensed as part of Windows Server, so you aren't paying extra for something that you may already have. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Systems (MOSS) is licensed separately can the costs can very rapidly grow to very large numbers for larger enterprises depending on what features are desired or how the farm is laid out.
Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only one here who had ever tried to pull data out of SharePoint. While I'll agree with many of the posters in this thread that SharePoint can be as much trouble as a help, the idea that it is some vendor lock-in fortress is just stupid.
Hell, you can drag and drop your files out of a document library using Windows Explorer, this is hard? Or, for single items, left-click the down arrow, click Send To, click Download a copy, fuck this is hard! BTW, this even works in FireFox, though you do have to disable NoScript, which I guess can be hard if you have a room temperature IQ.
Oh ya, and as someone else has already pointed out, you could always dig into the SDK and write programs against it to move data in and out.
But yes, SharePoint is a fortress which eats your data, pollutes the environment, and kicks puppy dogs.
Come on guys, MS's software has enough problems, without us making shit up.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.