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.

Comments

"brilliant"?? As in "blinding" or as in "smart"?

[mnemotronic]

Been using sharepoint for a while. In my dictionary, it has replaced GW Bush as the prototypical instantiation of "lame". Caveat - out Sharepoint admins have not taken any classes and are attempting to administer the site by studying in their "spare time" (ha. right).

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.