Bloody Microsoft

[mbarrick]

SharePoint gives me a headache. This product is a dog's breakfast. There are hundreds of "templates" that aren't really templates because they are largely similar and the bits that could be templated because they do exactly the same damn thing aren't, and if you want to make a change you can't just do a search and replace because they are ever so subtly different even though they are functionally identical. One "template" will have a table cell <td valign="top">, another will have <td valign=top>, and another will have just <td>. Gah! Even if you want to just alter the cascading style sheet to make "site wide" design changes, you are fucked, because in one template a table row will have one class, in another the a differently named class in the individual cells does the same job, and in yet another there are div tags doing the same damn thing under a different class name and the damn blocks are nested in a way that the styles conflict with each other. I don't think there is a single box element in the whole damn application that doesn't get set and reset at least three times before being rendered. And since the are multiple sloppy inheritances per object and that number of inheritances isn't strictly accounted for in the CSS specification (which wouldn't matter anyway since there isn't once single browser out there that strictly follows the specification even for relatively simple uses of CSS) cross-browser functionality is an utter disaster. Multiply that by 1,497 "templates".

And then there are the fun little "black-box" bits that Microsoft doesn't give you control over, like the main navigation buttons that nest inside one of these dog's breakfast tables. You have a row in a table that is already impossible to deal with site wide thanks to the hodge-podge of HTML in varying states of compliance and the four different classes applying to each of eight different nested box elements and inside that are nested these fun little black-box elements that render a single link inside a nine-cell table, each cell and row with a different class name, an ID tag that doesn't match, and — best of all — aren't consistent from link to link.

I swear to God, there are 13-year old girls on Xanga that do better web coding.

In the immortal words of Dilbert, this is why technology decisions should be left to those that know their mass from a black hole.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

From a plain-vanilla content management standpoint, I always kind of liked Sharepoint. Having said that, I have never had an opportunity to really customize it to the degree you seem to be.

My general experience with CMS customization (aside from Sharepoint) is somewhat like yours, however. By the time you start getting into the stylesheets and HTML templates things can get ugly fast.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

There's a good point. SharePoint isn't meant as a content management solution. It's supposed to be a document management, collaboration and groupware solution. I've written more than a few custom content management solutions from scratch in less time than it will take me to customize this mess. That's why I wrote them from scratch - any CMS I've ever looked at as well has had the same problems and it was easier to build something consistent and tailored to the requirements at hand. I hadn't been looking at it that way but it sums up the problem nicely — this peice of crap is a CMS posing as groupware.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

That's the way I have generally looked at it -- that is, MS does market SharePoint as "Groupware", but to me it just lacks fundamental communication elements that in my mind make up groupware. Maybe I am showing my age, but when I think of groupware, I think of Exchange/Outlook, Domino/Notes, or something like SuSE Openexchange -- communication first, document management second.

Personally, I wouldn't implement SharePoint as a groupware solution (although I do like SharePoint for what it does). In an MS environment, I would use it to augment Exchange to provide user-managed document/content. For anything that requires company-wide consistency, custom forms in Exchange would be my preferred method... but then we are starting to get into the realm of VB (beyond most uers), hence the benefits of SharePoint from a network client perspective.

Anyway, I sort of stumbled upon an unintentional realization. In the back of my mind I realize SharePoint is supposed to be groupware, it's just not the way my brain categorizes it :-P

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

And therein lies the biggest problem. In order to use it as a groupware solution you not only need Exvhange, you need SharePoint Portal server, which requires MSSQL Server. You end up having to buy Exchange CALs, SPS CALS, and MSSQL CALS. Unless you are a big company with an Enterprise Agreement that gets very expensive and you end up stuck in the MS upgrade cycle whether you want to be or not. In order to leverage SharePoint's collaboration features, you need Office 2003, Outlook 2003, Exchange 2003 and MSSQL Server 2000. The Exchange requirement forces Windows Server 2003. Running SPS and Exchange on the same box, to make the two 2K3 licenses, with all the attendant CALS... and no guarantee that the next version on any of the products is going to support any of the others or that there will be a clean upgrade path from any one product to the next - in all likelyhood the hold shiterie will have to be ripped out and replaced in three years if you have a need to upgrade any one small part. Not good at all for a SMB with a tight budget.