Sharepoint
1Hi folks, it looks like GoatCo will be making a push towards using Sharepoint much more often (currently usage is zero), and yours truly is likely to be heavily involved in this process.
Curious to know your thoughts on what you like about Sharepoint, what you hate, and what you’d like to have known earlier in the process.
What worked well for you (if anything)?
Rants gladly accepted.
- 6 comments, 9 replies
- Comment
We had a customer whose IT working (nonmanager) folks, on their own time and initiative, set up these wonderful internal services called “Wikis”. They first used them for IT stuff, then expanded out into different departments because users demanded them, quickly becoming very helpful and liked services. They tied it into the home grown document control system and things worked well.
Then TPTB said ‘What is this thing!’ and then ‘Why are we running something that isn’t Microsoft? Stop it now!’, and then Microsoft said ‘Its OK we have this brand new product called Sharepoint and it can do what Wikis do and also further tie you into our ecosystem in an unbreakable fashion!’. And TPTB said “Hurrah, for there is no software but Microsoft and we are their profit.”
And the wikis were taken down, Sharepoint was brought up, and it could kind of do Wiki but not fully, and it couldn’t do document control worth shit, and the departments blamed the IT working people, and the IT working people got harangued and blamed for a year until Sharepoint could actually be made to do what the wiki had done from the start.
And then Microsoft said “Sharepoint can now replace your document control system” and TPTB said to make it so, and a couple years and versions later, it was made so once the capabilities of the old document control system could finally be replicated without Sharepoint crashing or breaking or losing documents… and the IT workers were blamed again for the delay.
And so the IT workers (we are told for the sites were no longer active customers) being sick and tired after so many years of still being nothing but unpaid beta testers for expensive software that was not reliable or capable of doing what was needed said ‘F*ck this noise’ and left for jobs were quality and capability mattered, where software had to be proven to be capable before it was purchase… or maybe they are flipping burgers, but at least they may be happier.
@duodec And: for our simplistic purposes it is now an adequate replacement for in house wiki usage (we didn’t use the document control aspects and have not done applications in it). Early on when we (also) were made to switch from PHP wikis running on our OpenVMS cluster, there were a lot of things that PMWiki and Mediawiki could do (and we barely started taking advantage of) that Sharepoint could not. The move crippled our efforts to build and learn enough to provide the capabilities to our customers for a while.
Also later versions of Sharepoint became rather epic resource hogs when we tried to use the more advanced features (not me, so sorry I can’t provide details). We’ve moved off Sharepoint wikis in favor (now) of cloud based application resources because running Sharepoint in Azure got expensive pretty fast because of the server size and load needed to support what the developers were trying to build.
I’ll be watching this topic with curiosity as well. I’m facing the need to support full-time remote users who are deeply integrated into our production processes, and share/collaborate several times per day. Initially I was heading into the VPN appliance territory, but I want to examine cloud storage options as well.
FWIW, we don’t do much Microsoft stuff. We would really mostly be using the cloud sharing bits.
@ruouttaurmind if you’re not a Microsoft shop already, chances are you can do better for less money with other options, depending on what your workflow requires. The only reason I’m even looking at it is because we’re already paying for it as part of Office 365.
@djslack I agree on premise, but the automated syncing feature supposedly offered by SharePoint is valuable to my organization. I haven’t done exhaustive research on the other options yet, so I can’t say if this feature is unique to Microsoft.
@ruouttaurmind you might check out teamdrive. There are many services to implement the shared drive/file sync scenario depending on what your needs are. If you don’t work with office docs primarily then SharePoint may be more complex than what you need. Then again it may be perfect.
@ruouttaurmind During my time with InterCall, now West Unified Communications, we used sharepoint to support all of our remote employees. We used a myriad of other programs; however, sharepoint was certainly doing the heavy lifting.
A brief, barely informed opinion: It seems to be a little bit of a pain in the ass to do things that are much easier with other (3rd party, cloud-based) systems. It has gotten better as time has progressed, but still seems to have a steeper learning curve than it should.
Now that we have a significant investment in office 365, it’s on my list to investigate how we can make better use of it. Some years back I had tried and given up on an on-prem install. In my current position I have set one team up with a onedrive for business shared folder (powered by SP) and they seemed to do ok with it, but turnover destroyed that team and its use went with some of those key members.
I’m more of a Basecamp guy.
Permissions suck. If you are going to be limiting access to libraries, folders or documents try to create groups and Grant authority by group. My favorite is contribute without delete. People can create and edit documents but cannot accidently delete them. And turn on versioning, it can be a lifesaver.
sharepoint is great for concurrent edits. We will have 8 people in a .docx all making changes at once and SP manages that for us.
Good luck, in my experience it takes a bit to get off the ground but then what seems like a brief time later there will be endless amount of content out there.
Well, I’ve been a SharePoint admin (on and off) since the SharePoint 2.0 days. Not much experience with 2013 or 2013 - our deployment isn’t there yet.
I’ll preface this by saying we’re a Microsoft shop with a really interesting mix of Nobel winning scientists and folks who don’t understand how bookmarks in web browsers work.
Most important comment: Make sure versioning is turned on for every list & document library. Then, even if there is a permission issue, you can restore the data and identify the person who messed things up.
I can confirm pretty much all of the comments in this thread:
About adoption:
Lists (and metadata on Document Libraries) are the where SharePoint really shines. If you’re looking to drive adoption, find a business unit that does work by either editing an excel sheet on a file share, or sending one via email. Make a SharePoint custom list with the rows and column in that sheet. Show users how they can edit individual lines, and how they can track change history on single lines, and kick off workflows based on those single lines. In some people, you can actually see the lightbulb over their head light up. You’ve just given them the power to make their own mini line of business application - which they were already doing in Excel or (gasp) Access, they were just invisible to IT, and also terrible to use.
Well, that was a lot of words. I hope at least some of them were helpful.
@jwsmart That’s super cool- do you have any experience transforming Word docs that are used as templates (things like stock agreements, contracts, etc) into Sharepoint, or should they just be put up as is, and let people use the concurrent editing features?
@jwsmart Are there things I shouldn’t be trying to get Sharepoint to do?
@dashcloud Once you save a document as a template (.dotx), you can add that to the document library as it’s own content type (with it’s own metadata fields, etc.).
For example, if you have a concept of a customer ID, you can add that field to the “contract” document type, and make it mandatory, etc. Then you can search/sort/filter on that field, and see all of your contracts (no matter what folder they’re in) and who the customer is, at a glance.
You can go down the rabbit hole VERY quickly with this stuff, and it’s very easy to over-engineer.
@dashcloud Shouldn’t do? Lots. A good rule of thumb is that if the search indexer can’t index the file’s contents, it shouldn’t be in there. Obviously, this is not a hard & fast rule. If you’ve got one binary stored with a bunch of documents, maybe it’s the right place.
That said - in the past you had to install a 3rd party component to index PDF’s, and those are perfectly normal to be on SharePoint. Not sure if they’ve fixed that recently. I’ve done interesting things in the past like installing a search ifilter for JPEG/EXIF metadata so it could be used as a content repository for photographs. Again, I think it does that out of the box these days.