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Microsoft Overhauls SharePoint To Compete With Slack In The Mobile Era (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is overhauling SharePoint today, and introducing iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile apps. The iOS SharePoint app will arrive by the end of June, with the Android and Windows 10 Mobile versions due for release later this year. All of the mobile apps are designed to make SharePoint more accessible on the go, allowing users to access things like corporate intranet sites and content. Alongside the new apps, Microsoft is also providing access to SharePoint Online document libraries in OneDrive mobile apps, and the ability to copy from OneDrive to SharePoint. Microsoft plans to synchronize SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client by the end of the year, and integrate SharePoint sites with Office 365 Groups. Microsoft's new Flow service, which lets you automate tasks, will also be integrated into SharePoint by the end of the year.
SharePoint 2016 was released officially today (it's been out a while but General Availability was announced today). During the announcement webcast they previewed many of these features. So it wasn't so much overhauled today as it was shown publicly for the first time today...
It's something that they've rolled out at work that nobody uses.
You too, huh? "Oh look, you'll be able to collaborate easier", to which everyone looked amazed and said to each other "Yup, I'll sure use that", and then proceeded to continue emailing each other documents in progress like they've been doing for twenty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's a Microsoft technology used to:
A) Share documents, lists, and calendars with other people in your organization who have absolutely no interest in, and never will look at those things.
B) Work well with only the current iteration of Internet Explorer, but not subsequent ones.
C) Mimic the look and functionality of a web site, but is coded like some kind of embedded control software for 1960's nuclear power plants that may one day be ported to work on an AS400 if it takes off.
I spent a fair amount of time as a SharePoint 2007 admin, and was recently rescued from having to oversee the migration to Office365 and OneNote (the latter of which I hear is a total cluster-f@#$).
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Worst product that Microsoft ever invented. Worse than Vista. But somehow it is popular with IT directors because they keep rolling it out despite the user's cries of despair. It also has a complicated API that requires spending lots of money on Microsoft classes, so that anyone who's gone through the classes is compelled to claim that that SharePoint is useful and not at all a waste of money. It's main purpose seems to be the stifling of all office communication and collaboration, so that Microsoft appears to be a functional organization in comparison.
I only use my department's SharePoint when I absolutely have to, but I've never been able to make heads or tails out of it.
It seems to be some kind of half-assed mashup of a website, a file share, a blog, a wiki and a revision control system. I think it combines just the worst attributes of each one. Maybe it makes sense to someone, but I can never find anything in that mess.
Most of the people I work with stick with one of those simple open source wikis that we have set up. You have to do manual markup to add stuff, but at least it makes sense.
It's an enterprise document sharing and collaboration tool, which pointy-haired bosses love, and no one (except them) uses.
I've observed and experienced the same thing. It seems to come about when Microsoft suits get together with corporate suits to do some suit talk, and then all of a sudden, hey, we have a new "solution" that will utterly transform your work life!
If you are in the IT department, your work life will indeed be transformed as now it is you who have been made responsible for ensuring all the results the Microsoft suits promised the corporate suits. If you are in another department, you'll go to some classes, log on once or twice, and continue doing things as you always have--- you know, in a manner that actually works.
My favorite feature is the tendency of the Office built-in gee-wiz integration to just sort of fail silently sometimes. Everything opens up fine. Hitting save seems to save it. Close it and there is no problem. Then go back to sharepoint and where are your changes? If you are lucky maybe still somewhere in your %TEMP% folder. Fun, fun.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The consultancy I work at also has sharepoint consultants and I've seen massive operations use it very well especially after it's been setup properly.
It may be have the worst attributes of everything but that's because of what it tries to do: everything.
Want a document management system? Sharepoint!
Want a media management system? Sharepoint!
Want a collaboration system? Sharepoint!
Want a CMS based website? Sharepoint!
Want a file server? Sharepoint!
Want a blog? Sharepoint!
Want a database link for time management? Sharepoint!
Want a front end for your accounting system in SAP? Sharepoint!
Are you an admin and want some job security by creating a completely unmanageable system that no one will understand except for you? 3 words: Share Fucking Point!
Ok jokes aside, if you want to do any single thing then Sharepoint is quite horrible. But if you want to do everything then Sharepoint as frustrating as it is can be a one stop shop.
Worst product that Microsoft ever invented.
Only if setup incorrectly or used poorly i.e. just as a DMS.
Sharepoint has a great benefit from being able to do everything. It doesn't do everything well. Heck it doesn't do anything well. But it does do everything. That's the reason why IT want to roll it out. A document management system, media management system, content management system, database front end, collaboration back end all rolled into a website.
I am one of the users who cries, but in the past 7 years at my company I've seen the number of programs and links to various different software packages / online web interfaces drop from about 20 to 1, and for all the wasted effort in fighting Sharepoint there are great benefits in not having to learn a shitload of different systems ... assuming your IT department has any kind of consistency when they attempt to put things into sharepoint.
At least it doesn't try to be an init system.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yup, one of the best and one of the worst features listed in subsequent comments.
No its more like, we are taking away your really efficient useful department file server that you can easily share and exchange documents on with this horrid web application.
Instead of just being able to efficently drag and drop files or save documents directly to a path from an application you get open your browser and navigate this website everytime.
No you refuse?
Okay well there is explorer integration that makes it look like file sever again! You will love it, oh well you can only copy files back and fourth in Explorer or your Microsoft Office applications, you'll need to save your third party applications documents locally and then copy the file. Its several orders of magnitude slower than the file server was! Also you will be able to open documents just fine but inexplicably get spurious connectivity errors that prevent you from checking it out for edit. When that happens just save a local copy and hope nobody else also tries to edit the document before you can upload your changed copy, or you can go back to the web browser and manually check it out. Its better though! We insist its better!
Every end user I know at every company that uses it calls it "Swarepoint'. Collaboration software it may be but its the worst productivity killer I have ever met!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I hate sharepoint, but the versioning and real time co-authoring is one of the things they got right - it's a few clicks to turn it on (per library) and it works very very well...
Slack is a private chat client for use with teams of employees. It's a lot like multi-media capable IRC chat, with direct messages, pre-created channels, but with the ability to paste in images, code fragments, multi-line comments, youtube links, etc.
We use it, it works very well and is cross-platform. You can also tie it into GitHub (to announce when an issue is created/closed, or a pull request is created), as well as tying into other systems.
You could probably do all this with IRC, but Slack does it in a more polished fashion that just works.