Siolon

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.