Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats

ericatcw writes "Taking a page out of McDonalds 'billions and billions served,' Microsoft says it reaps $1.3 billion a year from more than 100 million users of its SharePoint collab app. But some suggest that the figures are consciously inflated by Microsoft sales tactics in order to boost the appearance of momentum for the platform, reports Computerworld. A recent survey suggests that less than a fourth of users licensed for SharePoint actually use it. SharePoint particularly lags as a platform for Web sites, according to the same survey, a situation Microsoft hopes to fix with the upcoming SharePoint 2010."

Comments

Well, I guess it's business as usual...

[ls671]

I don't use Share Point and I don't especially like Microsoft but just to put things in perspective:

We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)

A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.

Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual...

[WaywardGeek]

While I'm a bit of a Microsoft fan, I just can't see putting my data on their servers. It'll go Sidekick for sure.

Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual...

[nxtw]

We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)

Irrelevant. SharePoint isn't an end-user application; it's a web-based application, and is mostly implemented on intranets. The number of SharePoint users can't be measured by web metrics. SharePoint is occasionally used on internet-facing sites, but it is licensed differently.

Microsoft is claiming they have sold some amount of SharePoint client licenses and therefore have that many SharePoint users; the argument is the number of actual users is significantly smaller than the number of sold licenses.

Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual...

[corbettw]

Eh, if that's what they're doing, who cares? They know how many licenses they've sold, and they know how many seats those licenses cover. They can't possibly know how many of those seats are actively used, so of course the only useful data they can share is the first set and ignore the second.

Saying they have "millions of users" isn't particularly meaningful, but at least in this case it's not really deceptive, either.

Screw Sharepoint

[realmolo]

Seriously. It's overly complex, and doesn't really make anything easier for the vast majority of users. It's a nice IDEA, but in practice, it just gets in the way. It's one of those things that big companies buy and use thinking that it will solve their communication problems, when in fact all it does is create different and worse problems.

Re:Screw Sharepoint

[1729]

FWIW ... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.

If you're stuck with it because your company bought it and expects you to use it, then my honest advice is to, man-up, take a training course and learn to use it.

Gee, you don't by any chance work for Dell, do you?

Re:Screw Sharepoint

[Nefarious Wheel]

Well, we use Sharepoint at our company, a reasonably large global SI. I see it as a necessary pain, myself. We share a lot of material across more than thirty countries, and I don't think sending that much SMB directory detail around to do the same thing via file shares is a particularly good use of time or bandwidth. Just listing directories on a server - geez, even the servers themselves - is a slow process when you're on the other side of the world, and we have a decent networking budget and some very, very good network people.

That said, it's still a slow and uncomfortable alternative. The UI is a bit below par for anyone who has used a decent content management system, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is it's slow. You can learn the clicks if the response is good, but delays get people all bound up in navigation.

It's based on SQL Server as a storage medium. That's a decent enough database, but it's still an RDB, and the delays in setting up connections to that database, plus all the TCP overhead bouncing from router to router in establishing that connection adds seconds to your session, seconds you wouldn't feel if the files were stored locally (to say nothing of the compression-decompression overheads).

I think there's a fundamental misconfiguration to most Sharepoint sites, and that's the major source of its clunkyness. Using a database designed for speedy delivery of TPC-sized transactions, and using it to store whole large documents may be the best way to get Microsoft-based content available on a Microsoft-shaped browser perhaps, but it seems to me there's a lot of indexing and leaf balancing to get in the way of really crisp performance unless you're very clever with the database and have a lot more RAM available to cache it than appears rational on the surface.

I'm not sure if there's a lot of scope to improve that, but some would certainly be appreciated. I think it needs a custom database designed to purpose, not the general purpose SQL Server engine. Just a feeling* I have.

Cutting the number of hops somehow would help - perhaps a store-local and replicate model would do a better job; something like the block-level geographically distinct replication of fault tolerant disk farms perhaps (Didn't Exchange public folders work on this principle once?) but I don't know how I'd go about doing that.

*A feeling perhaps helped along by 10 years as a DBA, and a year or so as a Sharepoint SME and a few years as a network engineer (basically I know just barely enough to be dangerous with it - I could be old and out of touch).

Re:Screw Sharepoint

[DrWho42]

I agree that SharePoint sucks, and I took a training course. I work for a large corp that has migrated all of the intranet to SP and my colleagues and I pretty much universally dislike it. It's slow, bloated, and the access controls are like a Soviet bureaucracy. If the only software that you use is Microsoft, then it can be a useful tool. But if you try to deal with Sharepoint using Firefox or Linux, it is extremely frustrating. If you are accustomed to the openness and speed of mediawiki then SP feels like a dog. I'll be setting up a Wave server as soon as google releases the source.

Re:Screw Sharepoint

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Just wait until you make a mistake, and it puts your user object in the gulag OU...

In my(admittedly somewhat limited) experience with it, sharepoint seemed like a mess. Pretty much the slipshod bastard child of a wiki full of office documents and a half-assed collaboration/versioning mechanism. It probably feels like the second coming of Raptor Jesus if your collaboration mechanism has traditionally been either "just map to 'new project docs' on 'data2' and remember to number your new version" or "let me forward you the email chain and attachments"; but it was not a pleasant change after using real tools.

Re:Screw Sharepoint

[jazzkat]

"There is nothing wrong with SharePoint. It has a reasonable learning curve, you just have to invest a little bit of time into actually learning how to productively use it."

I spent 4 weeks learning about SharePoint. There are two tiers of functionality: that you can get from plain jane Sharepoint, and that you get from MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server).

Unless you fork over the money for MOSS, you do not get any functionality over what you would get from Plone, an open source product. As an added bonus, Plone is far easier for non-technical folks to use than Sharepoint - so instead of dedicating IT resources to creating sites, you push that cost center off to the users and free up your resources for something else.

MOSS is prohibitively expensive. For 2500 seats, you're looking at around $400k to start plus $130k/year.

For (far less than) that amount, you could hire a developer to add MOSS-like features to Plone. The MOSS features really don't produce enough ROI to justify the expense, unless you are looking at adding third party BI applications (many of which require MOSS) that may or may not produce ROI by their own merits.

Yep, SharePoint is a failure.....oh brother......

[LibertineR]

Talk about sour grapes......

Whether every single SharePoint CAL that was purchased is actually in use, is irrelevant to the point of ridicule.

Did they sell it? Did someone BUY it? THEN COUNT it, baby!

Instead of bitching, someone should be crediting Microsoft for how they manage their CALs and bundling.

This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.

Small Business Server

[Simulant]

I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).

Hell, I can't even figure out what it's good for.

Re:Small Business Server

[Simulant]

"you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it. "

Ok, let me rephrase that. "I can't figure out what it's good for with regard to my clients."

And I can't. I know what it does. I just can't, with a straight face, anyway, recommend it as a way to improve anything they do without a) increasing costs, b) increasing complexity, and c) limiting their options. The customer isn't always an idiot and they won't always spend money on something they don't really need or want. (except in the case where it is bundled)

My point was.... MS is probably counting all of those unused, bundled installations as users.

Oh... and as it stands, we make a comfortable living selling non-MS solutions, more specifically tailored to our customer's needs.
The ruthless capitalist in me thinks that pushing SharePoint would probably just cut into our margins.

Not that I'm a ruthless capitalist or anything.

Re:Not Surprised

[nxtw]

The last I looked at it you *have* to run it as a default site, so that means you need yet another server and it's part of the panopoly of ridiculous deployment shite coming from the MSDN lunatics at the company that you can use to blow your foot off with.

Large organizations that use SharePoint probably already have a large virtual machine farm, and would have used separate VMs in any case.

Because it only seems to be sold to 'enterprises' that means that the wider world isn't using it at all and many software developers won't be writing for it either.

People are definitely developing for SharePoint. Most development is oriented for enterprise use, however.

As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.

SharePoint has mindshare within large organizations.

Re:A big company inflating numbers to look better?

[overThruster]

Why, we have the data right here on our SharePoint site--just a moment while I search for it. That's funny, all the search hits are completely irrelevant. Ah, thank goodness, someone sent me an email with the link or I never would have found it.

Error: Access Denied
You are currently logged in as: BORG\Microserf

Request Access
Use this form to request access to the resource.
You are currently logged in as: BORG\Microserf
Type your request, and then click Send Request.

Aw hell, let me see if someone posted it to the wiki...

Re:Yawn.

[glwtta]

I know a bit about SharePoint (they've inflicted it on us at work) and as far as I can tell, the best alternative to SharePoint is Not Using SharePoint. Everything beyond that is basically gravy.

There's always this: http://www.alfresco.com/ though I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I can't really comment on how good it is.

Easy for users, hell for admins

[dan_barrett]

I administer the free version of Sharepoint at work. (sharepoint 3.0)

It's yet another tool from Microsoft where -

All the data is stored in one large impenetrable database blob - most content is stored in two dimensional "lists", which somewhat limits what you can do in terms of building online forms etc. ALL the list data is stored in the one table, which makes it non-intuitive to make that data visible outside of sharepoint.
It's easy for end users to generate lists, calendars, annoucement pages, document stores, surveys etc etc to their hearts content, so you end up with a big sprawling mess if it's poorly administered
it's easy to add canned 'web parts" but impossble to alter the functionality of those parts. eg, try to prevent staff from seeing survey results, for example. (yes, it's possible but it's not exactly intuitive, and extremely hard without the assitance of Sharepoint designer, which was not free until recently)
Microsoft keep changing the search engine strategy for the product; Search has mysteriously failed on our implementation with few error messages to provide clues.
It doesn't really work properly unless you integrate it with Active directory, Microsoft Office, Infopath, and ideally MS Exchange. Vendor lockin for the win!

So why are we using it? Our staff love it, as it's easy for the end user to figure out; but it's an absolute pig to administer.

In terms of usage stats, I note it comes with every copy of Windows small business server. Perhaps they're including that in the usage stats?

Open source alternative

[fiannaFailMan]

I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!

SharePoint isn't always reliable

[Orion Blastar]

I know that Law Firms had a conference to use Sharepoint for Legal Practice Management Software. I wrote an original ASP based Docket Calendar, and Law Firms want to move their Docket Calendars to Sharepoint. I can tell you that when you have a law firm and you want reliability, Microsoft isn't always the best choice. Some law firms still use Wordperfect and other non-MS software because they have found MS software to be low quality in performance and reliability. But the majority of big law firms are hooked on Microsoft for everything as Microsoft bundles software into neat packages for them and provides paid support for everything. The big law firms think that putting everything on Microsoft is a safe bet, but the law firm I worked at went millions of dollars over budget because of support calls, replacing hardware, replacing software, and hiring consultants when Microsoft could not give any answers or solutions to our problems. Back then it was Windows 2000, Office 2000, and Visual BASIC 6.0, and ASP 3.0, but the move to Dotnet only made matters worse. Finally Microsoft is working out the bugs in Dotnet, but in doing so they have created new ones. Sharepoint 3.0 was a nifty program until Microsoft filled it with bloated features that it needs Windows 2008 Server because it won't run on older Windows Servers forcing companies to pay for upgrades to Windows 2008 Server and new server hardware, just like the last time I used Windows Server and Microsoft software in a legal environment.

Keep in mind these are "hidden costs" that do not count many wasted work hours trying to work around the MS bugs in programming, or trying to restore a crashed server or workstation. That expenses can reach record amounts as well as have downtime for the entire firm.

There are only two known FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint but Wiki sites are usually better and faster and in most cases free to use. I tried getting Wiki implemented in my former work places only to be laughed at. But a Wiki search is faster than a Sharepoint search, and a Wiki need not use Windows Server and can run on Linux, *BSD Unix, or Mac OSX or some other platform to save money.

my anecdotal experience

[Anarchitektur]

I'm a consultant for an Microsoft Gold Partner VAR for one of the Microsoft business applications, and a lot of times the talking heads at Microsoft will go on and on about the "Microsoft Stack" and how CRM can integrate with SharePoint and all this kind of stuff, but in all the years that I have been working in this field, I have never once encountered an implementation of SharePoint at a client, nor have I had any requests to do one.

That does not mean that there isn't interest at a lot of these companies for SharePoint, though. It's just that the total cost after purchasing the licenses and then paying someone to implement it properly is too cost prohibitive for the types of companies that would benefit from using it.

Furthermore, there really are not very many "guru-level" people on SharePoint. There's barely any "adequate" talent for SharePoint... I hear it all the time from a lot of my peers that there's not even anyone out in the field trying to get a practice started up around it in this very large, very wealthy (per captia) city. Excuses range from "lack of demand" to "no one to do the work", to the ever popular "everyone is only seeing the tip of the iceberg" that Microsoft is so apt to spin.

So, that's my perspective as someone in the realm of that field... whatever that is worth.