"SharePoint is a fine tool for building custom portals, lightweight community…

Posted by Martin Koser on 25. October 2011; This entry is filed under Design and more.
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"SharePoint is a fine tool for building custom portals, lightweight community websites and a number of other web site oriented views. But it is the wrong tool for the job when you want to empower your cloud workforce by simply provide secure mobile access to files across your business and users, across PC, Mac, iOS and Android, and across non-Microsoft applications."

http://blog.oxygencloud.com/2011/10/18/want-to-work-in-the-cloud-sharepoint-isnt-the-answer/

#history et al. 😉

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Want to work in the cloud? SharePoint isn’t the answer
Microsoft SharePoint was released in 2001 as a tool to simplify the building of websites and basic web applications. I remember using v1.0 to create a simple portal for my business school and a few……

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  1. Michael Gisiger October 25th, 2011 at 08:42

    True words …

  2. Martin Koser October 25th, 2011 at 08:44

    especially the last four of them, yes ;(

  3. Michael Ricard October 25th, 2011 at 08:49

    Works great for silo-building but key to Enterprise 2.0 collaborative working is bridging silos. The clumsy user permissions make it difficult for sites to be inclusive across the organization without full-time admin management. Shee-ite compared for built-for-purpose social platforms like Jive and Telligent.

  4. Martin Koser October 25th, 2011 at 08:54

    +Michael Ricard right, it's got plenty of places in corporations (where it's growing like mushrooms in silos).

    #knowtheenemy

  5. Michael Ricard October 25th, 2011 at 09:01

    Yes, it works best in the dark with a liberal sprinkling of fertilizer to let those 'shrooms grow. SharePoint is not the way to go if you want cultural transformation – it's more of an inhibitor of social and a reinforcer of vertical-style managment – both contrary to what is happening in forward-thinking organizations.

    Thanks Martin for drawing my attention to yet another well argued article about SharePoint's limitations. Unfortunately, it won't do anything to dissuade IT departments everywhere from jumping onto the SharePoint bandwagon.

  6. Martin Koser October 25th, 2011 at 10:31

    +Michael Ricard hehe, probably not – but it's always good to have some counter-arguments ready and set …

    Re: the long-term outcomes of the Sharepoint uptaking – not sure if it's a bad thing after all, but companies aren't utilizing the fullest potentials of social software social business in the enterprise with it and that's bad enough

  7. Robert Finney October 25th, 2011 at 10:45

    Interesting article which pulls out some key points – UI for SharePoint does need a lot of work especially for mobile devices (i.e. the devices that you're most likely to be using on the road), one could also argue a greater breakdown of features for more granularity would also help adoption. There are some things that you have missed out though:

    SharePoint Workspace – allows for offline working and management of files whilst disconnected from a site – avaialble both internal deployments and O365.
    Office Web Apps – makes it easier to edit docs without needing Office – a very easy and straight-forward way of editing content.

    Ther are a couple of points I'm unsure what you mean by them:
    •Content management requires upload and download from the portal hub, which minimizes how much you can reasonably put in the system
    The limit of the content is down to the sizing of the solution – content management is available on publishing sites but not on Team Based sites – I don't really agree that this limitation is in place…

    •Because users usually don’t have a complete set of information in the portal, users end up with redundant content everywhere, which limits adoption
    SharePoint Workspace goes a long way to resolve this – the other issue around this is cultural – get people away from their inboxes and to a better way of managing content – this is not a limitation of tech but company culture (still a big barrier to a successful deployment of SharePoint)

    A carefully planned and deployed solution can be highly effective, as I said, it's primarily the Ui that needs resolving.

  8. Martin Koser October 25th, 2011 at 11:52

    +Robert Finney thx for adding to the thread … (alas, I didn't pen the blog article, only highlighted it).

    That said I am with you mostly – ie. implementation floats and sinks the boats and cloud computing is more of an answer than most think now. Mobile devices accessing content in the cloud may well be the norm soon. If Office 365 can cater to people's need the better (well, I am writing this from a Debian machine where there's LibreOffice et al. 😉