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.
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...
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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
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.
Isn't the Data Liberation group the same group that kidnapped Patty Hearst?
Data wants to be free! People? Not so much.
O3Spaces
Lenya
SugardCRM
Alfresco
Main pyrus
Nuxeo
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
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.
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
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.
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]
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.
Easy spin for Microsoft. SharePoint, or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) comes with each Server 2003 license/CAL. I guess Microsoft could say they've also sold 1.3B in DFS, 1.3B in LDAP/Kerberos authentication, etc. :)
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...
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.