SharePoint Sucks – And Here’s Why I Still Love SharePoint (AKA Part 4)

Have You Lost Your Mind?

OK, so by now, most readers, especially those who know me or are regular readers of this blog, probably wonders if I’ve gone complete over the edge. Why would I bash the product I spend so much time using? Are all my previous posts about how cool SharePoint can be just rubbish? Did I wake up an see the Linux light at the end of the very long Microsoft tunnel?

To answer those questions, I would like to quote an ancient Chinese saying, rumored to be one of the first responses ever to a proposal. Hell no!

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve said quite a lot of things about SharePoint that may lead you to think I hate SharePoint. I don’t. Quite the contrary, I love SharePoint. Yeah, it sucks, but so does my wife, and I’ve married her twice. Thankfully, she doesn’t read ancient Chinese.

So what’s going on here? Why the attitude? Well, it’s really very simple. SharePoint does suck. It does suck on the topics I’ve mentioned. Yes, if you don’t set up security properly, and that’s far from easy, SharePoint isn’t secure. I did ‘hack’ Microsoft’s own SharePoint security by clicking on a link posted in public and entering my LiveID. Yes, the workflow engine has the limitations I mentioned. Yes, blogging in SharePoint isn’t really a viable option if blogging is an important thing for you, and it sure as hell sucks if it’s the only thing you want out of your software package.

I’ve focused on the bad stuff in the previous three posts, and these are really bad things. And I also meant that there are a lot of other areas too, such as documentation, validation, compliance, artificial limitations, in addition to the areas I explicitly mentioned.

However, SharePoint excels in far more areas than the areas in which it completely sucks. How much is ‘far more’? To put this in a cosmic scope, let’s say that the suckage of SharePoint equals the size of the… I don’t know… Something huge… The Sun! As in the celestial body, not the newspaper. That’s pretty huge, right?

OK, let me quickly take 2 minutes and 39 seconds of your life, and show you one of the coolest videos I know.

SharePoint coolness is the size of the Pistol star. Yes, I know, it’s nothing compared to the biggest stars, but then again, the SharePoint team needs something for which to strive.

So, in the interest of cosmic balance, since we’re on that topic, I’m going to post a series on some of the true beauty of SharePoint. I’ll focus on the topics that I find to be most important to me, just like I focused the suckage series on the topics that most annoyed me. I’ll show you why I think that SharePoint as a platform is not only the best platform available, because that really isn’t saying much, but also why it is a good platform for future development, on which you can and should build your organizational information infrastructure.

To answer the question, once and for all, of whether I hate SharePoint, let me put it this way: SharePoint, will you marry me?

(answered with a roar of ancient Chinese, I’d guess)

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