Tag Archives: critique

The SharePoint Grade Card

I have now had a much larger exposure to SharePoint’s product offering, and I feel in a much better and knowledgeable place to assess the strength and weaknesses of the technology.  Like any product that attempts to serve a wide range of functionality there are going to be stronger and weaker areas.  One thing the SP team at Microsoft does well is addressing shortfalls in the technology as it matures.

I’ll evaluate each of, what I deem to be, the major functions and tools of SharePoint.  OK, let’s get started.

Windows SharePoint Services — A

Windows SharePoint Services or WSS is now in its third major iteration.  It is the core that MOSS is built upon, and it is where the strength of SharePoint lies.  From it’s incredible Office integration, task and document management, and web part personalization options WSS is what caught my eye and made me desire a career change.There are some minor headaches and pitfalls, but certainly not enough to warrant anything less than an “A” in this category.

Social Networking Capability — B–

Unfortunately, SP didn’t do what I would’ve liked to see in this category.  They introduced “My Sites” in MOSS, but adding colleagues isn’t intuitive and the feature turns into a personal SharePoint site instead of a robust social networking tool for the enterprise.

Blogs and wikis were also introduced in WSS 3, and the inclusion of them is promising but the implementation is poor.  The blog is feature-less allowing only categories and less than impressive personalization features.  The wiki is super basic, and it leaves me confounded on how it seems so quickly implemented.  A look at the benchmark, MediaWiki, will show the lack of robustness in the SP implementation.

Enterprise Search — B+

The MS work on their search in MOSS is surprisingly amazing.  While many companies introduce search replacements for MOSS, often times they are trying to fix poorly architect edsearch solutions with the MS offering.

The search in SP offers many options for optimal information architecture including best bets, search logging/analysis, search scopes, and much more.  It’s impressive to say the least.  The crawler is also very, very effective with filters to spider other forms of content.  They even introduced federated search to this offering, and it makes it all-the-more impressive.

The only reason this doesn’t get an “A” is the search results and placing search in the default interface isn’t worth the high grade although this can be edited by any capable designer.

Business Intelligence — C+

Default business intelligence in SP is less than stellar.  Although key performance indicators (KPI) are in the offering it is simply a graphical display of business data.  Corporations need far more robust diagramming and analysis tools for true business intelligence, and it has been a ripe area for other companies to pick up what is lacking in this feature.

Excel Services is an interesting addition to this as it allows the graphing and analysis of Excel data which is the most rudimentary of business database and business intelligence applications.  I look forward to this being beefed up in the next version of SP.

Web Content Management — B

Web Content Management or WCM was one of my specialties in my last business that shares the name of this site.  I chose WordPress as my tool of choice, but there are fantastic tools including Drupal, Dot Net Nuke, Graffiti CMS, and many others that do a fantastic job with each having their own strengths and weaknesses.

The SP offering of WCM has moved them from solely a intranet/extranet tool into the Internet realm.  WCM is also done differently than or web CMS’.  SP uses metadata in a single list to control what content is available to the page creator in SP Designer.  Creating page layouts then becomes foundational to all SP WCM. Even though pages can be created and metadata is more focused on then other tools such as WordPress or Drupal it still leaves much to be desired.

The workflow of creating metadata to then be used on any form of WCM pages I find quite restricting, and it ultimately slows down the contributor who understands nothing about the WCM architecture.  Inline editing of the content is also less than impressive.  The rich text editor is shaky at best, and the constant need for modal windows hinders usability for the contributor.  To edit the “backend” is only a list without a robust administration interface found in other popular CMS’.

SharePoint Designer and Interface — D

I’m putting both the default interface and SP Designer in the same category since they are so inter-related.  The default interface is clunky, navigation is abundant but poorly implemented, and the “obviousness” of the SP interface is less than obvious.  Also, in the interface the markup is absolutely horrendous.  Typical of ASP.NET controls it outputs horrendous markup.  This hinders accessibility, ease of branding, and even in the realm of SEO when using SP for public-facing sites.  The markup reminds me of what MS is all-to-often ridiculed for lack of web standards awareness.

SP Designer is the approved tool to brand the SP interface.  It’s built on the legacy of FrontPage, and it’s capability and interface is very reminiscent of FrontPage.  However, seemingly they are learning from their rich IDE in Visual Studio and allowed it to influence the designer options and functionality.  If it weren’t for the ability to open up the content database I would never, ever use the tool.  It is expensive, bulky, and there are free editors that make SP Designer look amateur.

The ability to do XSLT in a GUI manner is an interesting perspective, and it makes such a difficult topic somewhat attainable by a non-XML/XSLT expert.  Also, the workflow wizard is actually quite impressive.  Although it has limitations I was able to create a rather complex workflow with logic rather painlessly.

Looking Forward

I’m hoping that these deficiencies will be address and strengths strengthened in the next version of SharePoint.  I understand much of what I criticized is still “version 1.0,” and I expect it to mature.  SharePoint is a powerful platform, and I expect it to continue to dominate the ECM market for years to come.

Leave a reply

IE 8 Compatibility Mode and SharePoint

Recently, the Internet Explorer team released IE 8 beta 2.  It’s a monumental leap forward for not only web designers but also the Internet.  However, it is not without controversy, but first it needs a little background.

A Little Background

Internet Explorer has for a long time been the bane of web developers.  Every since they won the browser war over Netscape (nearing a decade ago now) with what were judged unethical and illegal means which led to a monopoly investigation.  That was settled and Microsoft allowed to continue.  Since then web designers have had to hack, glue, and curse IE due to its large lead on browser usage.

Internet Explorer 6 released in 2001 has been the infamous browser that just will not go away.  Grassroots movement such as Save the Developers have said “enough is enough” and want to see IE 6 erased from the technology landscape.  But even in 2008, seven years later, they still average around 25% of all browsers in usage today.  IE 7 was released and was a huge step forward in standards conformance, security, and compatibility.  It gave both designers and end users hope for the future of IE.

The Controversy Today

Recently when IE 8 was announced it boasted an impressive conformance to several web standards including CSS 2.1, DOM improvements, and even parts of HTML 5.  It also boasted that it passed the Acid 2 test which tested conformance to the CSS standard published by the W3C.  We were all excited until they made their second announcement.

The IE team, under intense political pressure, offered three modes of browsing in terms of web standards support.  It offered the following.

  1. Quirks Mode — long standing behavior reminiscent of IE 6, and it was used when no DOCTYPE was specified.
  2. IE 7 Mode — With a DOCTYPE it rendered according to IE 7’s standards support.
  3. Standards Mode — with the inclusion of a META tag IE 8 would render in the strictest manner possible according to the DOCTYPE.

The community revolted in a way I’ve never seen before, and the IE team decided to have the standards mode be initiated by default with a DOCTYPE, and if the designer wanted IE 7 mode he had to use a META tag.  A major victory was won, and designers everywhere rejoiced and anticipated IE 8.

Compatibility Mode for Intranets

With the release of beta 2 of IE 8 they introduced compatibility mode with some interesting defaults.  They announced that IE 8 would, by default with a DOCTYPE, render all Internet (public) pages in the strictest manner possible per the aforementioned victory.  However, by default all intranet sites (with a URL such as http://moss) would render in compatibility mode.

It’s interesting that they mention SharePoint specifically in the blog post, because I’m sure this move was politically based as I have yet to see a web-based MS application with the political clout that SharePoint has in the enterprise.  This setting is configurable by Group Policy, but it is doubtful that many enterprises will take this as an action item.

Thankfully, the IE team has two META tags that can override all these compatibility view settings.  One emulates IE 7 rendering engine used most prominently for backwards public-facing sites, but there is also an emulate IE 8 META tag to force sites, even specified to render in compatibility mode.

So, Why Should I Care?

I believe there are two major ramifications of this.  The first effects the end user, and the second effects intranet developers.  The only people I can really see caring about this on the development side are those branding SharePoint.  Let’s talk about each.

First of all, the end user doesn’t have the final say whether or not a site is rendered in standards mode or not.  Now, probably most if not all end users could care less, but the addition of a button in the address bar that appears “broken” designates pages that may not be broken but actually rendering perfectly in standards mode but the end user could be drawn to change the behavior because it appears the page is broken.  So with a misleading option in the UI and overriding behavior given to developers over users is a concern.

Secondly, the concern is for those branding SharePoint or other intranet sites.  What scares me is that this decision was pushed by, for instance, the SharePoint team for its product.  I fear that this is indicative of how the next version of SharePoint will be crafted—around compatibility mode and not standards mode.  Any developer will tell you how horrendous the markup and CSS is for SharePoint out-of-the-box.  I was eagerly anticipating the SharePoint team learning from their mistakes in crafting the core styles and master pages by going to a much stricter standards-based site which makes it much easier to brand, far more accessible, and even faster loading.

What Should MS Do?

My hope is that the IE team will respond to such a critique as this as they did their first decision.  Here are some steps I’d encourage the team to take:

  1. Render all sites, intra or internet sites in standards mode unless a META tag is present or lack of DOCTYPE.
  2. The end user has control over whether or not the site truly displays one way or another.
  3. Remove that confusing button in the IE UI which is a poor UX decision.

Will they respond as they did before?  I don’t know, but I can only hope they’ll see the negative ramifications of this for end users and developers alike.

4 Replies