They never have gotten access to work, and now they're applying the same thinking
to the web.

Microsoft; You have made a ton of great applications, SharePoint is not one of them and the only application that is worse to work with is SAP!

If it came down to it, I would rather stop developing all together than have to work with MOSS. I have 2 weeks left using this outrageous technology, You can be sure my stomach churns each time I even hear the word SharePoint or MOSS.

Its an absolute disgraceful technology.

senthilvel

Some great gotchas I have come across so far:

“Overwrite existing file” is checked by default – watch your help desk calls go through the roof and your backup tapes do constant restores.

Delete a site and it does not go into the the recycle bin like evrything else. Buy a third party product to intercept this I am told.

Rename a user in Active Directly and the users display name does not change in SharePoint. Write some custom code of my own to fix this I am told.

Accessability standards – don’t even go there. There are companies out there making buckets money of just trying to make SharePoint complaint to standards. I could do the changes myself I am told, anythings possible, thanks.

You can add files using the the explorer view and no meta data is collected, can I turn this off, oh no!

It goes on. Why do people defend such a product?

If it came down to it, I would rather stop developing all together than have to work with MOSS. I have 2 weeks left using this outrageous technology, You can be sure my stomach churns each time I even hear the word SharePoint or MOSS.

Its an absolute disgraceful technology.

However, they don’t want to “buy” MOSS if it does not come pre-configured for their business.

Since I’m working in the healthcare industry, we have corporate/federal regulations on top of the Microsoft Recommend Application Specifications. Also, there is always an existing structure already in place.

Instead of messing around with SharePoint or MOSS, if a customer/client/corporation requires a PORTAL ONLY, SharePoint is overkill.

A portal may simply require that the existing database is used, and new User Profiles created. It takes me less time/less money to deploy the components of .NET that I need for a portal, than to finagle SharePoint to do what I want.

That being said, if they want all the features of SharePoint, buy it! There’s no way I could custom develop the entire thing to make it cost-effective…

Ask yourself is the business going to wait for this…Or by time you are ready their plans could have changed:)
You are right it could be trdious to get somethings done.
But common ….. Wise up. Its just another product

I will discuss content and layout development.

The problem is that 70% of the firms/companies who use sharepoint wants to enable 120% of the features right away and with 0 customization in terms of layout/branding and content development. This leaves your portal shallow and empty with too much to mantain. Not to talk about access levels, and empty sites…Sharepoint is a huge and flexible intranet platform thats gives you everything and let you customize everything – and i mean everything!

We are running a sharepoint platform with very good amount of customization, very creative navigation, proper information channeling and customized access levels. Believe me its taking knowledge management and process improvement to new heights.

You just have to know you business needs and deliver based on this.

Regards,
Sam

However, it took an entire year for them to fire the third party contractor who was supposed to ‘implement’ the site – never mind that we’re a profitable, capable company that would not be perceived by its consumer base as that internally dysfunctional. Almost a year after that, they have decided to implement a highly restrictive access regime – something that would be fine if it were more than an ugly website with no access to even correct a misspelling or switch a data view to a more intuitive format. In effect, we’re using about 5 of the 6 0’s (dollarwise) to host a website that could be created for free.

So honestly my problem is more with our processes internally than SharePoint itself. The access policies as enacted by IT contains such a granular, hierarchical arrangement, that most people gave up on it a long time ago. We’re 2 years on and have received nowhere near the product we paid for – of course, this will be a corporate level discussion and is entirely our company’s own fault. But my question to whoever’s reading is, do you work in an environment where SharePoint is seen as a cryptic monolithic product that gets used to show a few web pages and store a few outdated documents? If so, what do you do instead?

That’s where I’m at right now – the product and the internal process is too much to bear, so we’re very likely to buy a separate turnkey solution like Clearspace very, very quickly and just do our own regional affair. Does anyone know of an alternative platform that is affordable, flexible, not too feature laden but at the very least able to be modified with styles and contain reasonable revisioning and access rights? And of course, it would have to be compatible with SP for that fateful day in 2012 that they decide we have to use it. We’re desperate to collaborate, and we want to do the right thing – one more decable with a CMS product and our employees will simply start going back to the days of writing requests on paper. Thanks for listening