SharePoint Reviews

(I think I am getting better at outrageous headlines to drag you in to read the post! … please don’t leave)

I recently read Jeremy’s post about picking SharePoint social over Yammer “for right now” and wanted to weigh in on why I think they are not making the call I would have.  It’s all just personal opinion of course and Jeremy and I are close friends and no doubt he will attempt to convince me otherwise over a few beers shortly :)

In my humble opinion the only reason you should consider using SharePoint 2013’s social features over Yammer is if your organization is 100% unable to use a cloud based service.

Why?

Because there isn’t a future in SharePoint on-prem social features.  It’s just not what Microsoft does when it changes direction.

When Microsoft takes a bet on something big there are never two options to pick from. There is only one option and the rest is dead to them.  Rightly or wrongly, whether you like it or not, for good or bad … that’s just the way it works.  This basically means that after that speed it approximately takes for one synapse to fire Microsoft and all its muscle (sales and otherwise) stopped selling on-prem social and started selling the new cloud social story like it was never any other way.  You won’t hear anything pitching on-prem social over Yammer and it will only be used as a fall back position if the organization cant use the cloud for whatever reason.

“What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.” – Jared Spataro, Senior Director – SharePoint, Microsoft Corp – 19th March 2013

Update 19th March 2013:  If you want more of a nail in coffin then look no further then Jared’s latest update on the Enterprise Social Roadmap. The quote above is from this post Yammer and SharePoint: Enterprise Social Roadmap Update. If you read that 90% of the post is dedicated to Yammer with a fraction dedicated to “If you are old and clunky and stay on-prem then here is a skinny bone to chew on”.

“Cool” you might say.  “That doesn’t change what you can and can’t do with the product.  On-Prem is still my bag baby!”

If you look at the features, pros and cons and line them up side by side on-prem SharePoint social will win the sprint today … by quite a long margin.

But mark my words … it won’t win the marathon.

Here is my prediction for the next couple of years.  SharePoint on-prem social features might be lucky to get a few new features. Maybe a some in the next update, maybe a few the one after.  But where we really quit the crap and bring on the meat will be in SharePoint + Yammer integration. This is obviously not rocket science given MS just spent $1B+ dollars on it. Everything social in SharePoint Online will be ripped out and replaced/backed by Yammer with deep integrations that don’t exist today.  100% effort will be put into this experience as a first class citizen vs. the on-prem story… sad face … I like on-prem too … but like I mentioned above on-prems dead baby.

Eventually there will be no Yammer. It will just be SharePoint Online with a lot more rocking social features built by a team that deeply understand Enterprise social.  MS didn’t buy Yammer for their customers (they were mostly already SharePoint customers anyway) … they bought them for the kudos in enterprise social and the team of people who get it. Microsoft needs to win enterprise social big time and Yammer are the A game.

So why would I say don’t invest in on-prem social with the SharePoint features you get in 2013 if you can at all help it?

I would put money on there not being a great upgrade story on-prem to whatever comes next in the cloud … if at all. There could be one IF you are using SharePoint social features in 365 today … maybe.

Maybe I will have to eat my hat some day when I look back at these words … but if I were made to pick a winning horse today I would be betting on Yammer and having a smoother path to niceness with future releases.

Sure, this might mean having a muddled and semi painful story now as Jeremy points out in his post. This might mean you need to educate users around using Yammer, doing some work to federate for authentication purposes so you don’t have two logins, doing some integration work to make it easier to post stuff to Yammer from SharePoint etc.…   at least until MS pull the next round of SharePoint integrations with Yammer out of the hat and make things a lot less confusing etc.…

But at the end of the day I would be ok with that vs. being backed into a corner that you cant get out of or have a harder time getting out of.  Even if that means living with a less integrated experience today.

Who knows … I could be 100% totally wrong (in some ways I wish I will be) but maybe I wont and I hope to have saved a few of you from writing a kilotonne of migration code trying to get all those posts, likes and follows moved over to Yammer … but having said that I am sure AvePoint will have a nice migration tool ready for that eventuality anyway … so maybe all this is moot :) PS: AvePoint migration tools rock by the way.

PS: The real moment I will freak out about Social in the enterprise will be when Facebook finally gets around to releasing an Enterprise offering walled garden style social experience for organizations.  I have thought for a while now that it would be “any moment now” … but nada so far.  If that happened and they offered light weight document collab etc.… it would be a game changer.  But maybe zuck is holding off while him and Steve continue their wee love fest while trying to stiff Google. Time will tell I guess.

Disclosure: The company I work for is a Microsoft partner

Inmagic recently blogged about the limitations of using SharePoint for library applications, and this prompted me to write this post sharing my recent experiences setting up a SharePoint site for a library catalogue.

We have been working with a client to create a SharePoint 2010 site for a new resource library to manage codes, standards and related documents.  SharePoint is this client’s preferred platform, and as their processes for getting approval for any new software such as a proper integrated library system are onerous, time consuming and often futile, it was decided to just accept the limitations of SharePoint. 

Once it was established that we would need to design a library catalogue in SharePoint, I went searching the web for advice and suggestions.   This in itself is not easy, as a core concept in SharePoint is “Libraries”,  so it is hard to differentiate terminologies and find results relevant to SharePoint usage in a corporate Library setting.  However the references I did find were mostly concerned with how unsuitable it was, although none gave any detailed specifics of particular issues.  I found one SharePoint based library system advertised, but the vendor website is no longer active, and I chatted to a reputed ILS vendor who mentioned spending three years trying unsuccessfully to port their ILS to SharePoint. 

The prospects for designing a catalogue in SharePoint for our client were therefore not promising!  I started our project with SharePoint 2007, but very fortunately the client was able to upgrade the site to SharePoint 2010 mid way through.  I would never attempt to design a catalogue (or anything else) in SharePoint 2007 again.   However with either version, there are still many frustrations, especially as in our situation we were not allowed access to SharePoint Designer which allows editing the underlying website and HTML.  We were required to work with our client’s templates, stylesheets and site structures to ensure a consistent branding across all their SharePoint sites. All comments below are therefore based on just the out of the box functionality available to a site administrator. 

Designing any site in SharePoint needs a thorough planning process, and discussion of this is beyond the scope of this post.  However for anyone contemplating designing a catalogue in SharePoint, here are some factors to consider.

Specifying content types:

• Most corporate library catalogs will include different types of material, i.e. books, reports, journals, videos, websites etc.  Some of these may require columns (fields) unique to a specific type.  For example you will probably want to add a Frequency column for a journal but not for the rest.
• By default, all columns show in all displays regardless of whether they have data.  (This reminds me of the original library systems which have now all long since hidden any empty fields!)
• To get around this, we set up different reusable Content Types each inheriting from a core set, and different views (display forms) for each type of material.
• Depending on your version of SharePoint and your specific site settings, there may be a lengthy list of content types and existing site columns to choose from.  There is a very rudimentary description of the expected content for each column,  but no indication in advance of parameters such as if the column type is pre-set, i.e as single line of text, multiple line of text, choice, lookup etc.  Changing a column from one type to another after the fact is often not an option.  Some may also have unexpected settings, e.g. the Route to External Location column.  There is no indication when adding it to your content type that this is a Required Yes/No column, or that it is a  persistent or “sealed” column that cannot be deleted!   There are 28 or so of these persistent columns including others with innocuous sounding names such as Article Date.
• SharePoint has several reserved column names that cannot be changed. Therefore “Author” in SharePoint terminology is the person creating the resource (record), not the author of a book. It’s not difficult to add a new column for BookAuthor or equivalent, but on the default search results, all records include this SharePoint Author column which is of course inappropriate in a library context. “Date” is also included by default too, but this is the Date entered not a Publication Date.

Formatting views:

• Most default views in SharePoint are columnar which is perfect for many types of information but does not work well with variable library data where for example, a title can be very short in one record, and very long in the next.  There is no easy way to force a set column width unless you have access to SharePoint Designer.
• There is a Datasheet view option which is very similar to Excel and would be great for quick editing, but SharePoint does not support this type of view if your content type includes any Managed Metadata columns. 

Managed Metadata:

• Managed Metadata provides a new taxonomy capability in 2010 which mitigates some of the other negatives when working with SharePoint. 
• We are using this new column type in several ways:
  • As a controlled vocabulary for our LC Subject Headings so that our technician can start typing and any matching terms are displayed. 
  • Synonyms or abbreviations can be included, so we use this for Publishers so that they are findable by both their full name and their acronym.
  • Terms can be added in a hierarchy so we use this for specifying a general Location and then a specific Office where the items are stored.
  • Multiple terms can be added to a record quickly, and new ones added either on the fly, or through the Term Store.  (However there is no way to batch add an existing list without SharePoint Designer.)
  • Best of all, we can use these Manage Metadata columns as Search Refiners to produce a faceted search results page.
• The downsides are that you cannot import records from a spreadsheet or use a Datasheet view if the list contains any Managed Metadata columns. 

Search Refiners:

• We were able to set up several custom search scopes and set the default search to the Library Catalogue only.  
• Our custom search results page is set up with multiple Search web parts including a Refinement Panel.  Choosing which columns to use as refiners is picky requiring editing a popup XML Editor, but at least it can be done without requiring SharePoint Designer.  However we have not been able to force a consistent order for displaying these refiners, so if a result set mostly belong to the same material type, that refiner is not considered important so it appears lower down the list. 

We have had to lower our expectations regarding what we will be able to accomplish without SharePoint Designer or any IT support. Fortunately the collection is predominantly virtual, so we have not had to think about printing spine labels or shelf lists sorted by LC Classification.  We now have a functioning catalogue and some workflow created with InfoPath forms to support requesting and approving new orders, but there is no question that a purpose built integrated library system would be preferable. 

It may appear that migrating an existing library system to SharePoint or starting a new catalogue would be a cost saving measure if an organization already has SharePoint.  However, as there are no commercial library packages offered on the SharePoint platform, any system will have to be developed and maintained internally.  This reminds me of the many library systems set up over the years in Microsoft Access that end up unsupported when the particular developer leaves. We have converted many of these Access databases to standard library software, but this can be a time consuming process as often the records have limited fields or authority control, requiring us to upgrade the cataloguing. 

For a few years now I’ve been pushing myself to see what is possible with SharePoint 2010. Some of these things are small, out-of-the-box (OOTB) solutions: creating custom search scopes, customizing table styles, and messing with itemstyle.xsl. But more often than not, the solutions I like to create are the ones that go beyond what SharePoint does OOTB. I rely heavily on SPServices for a lot of these solutions. It’s a great tool that does everything I need to do with lists in SharePoint. More recently I’ve been using SharePoint’s REST service and wiring in things like Backbone.js to create some interesting solutions.

Side note: if you want to see some great front-end solutions using SharePoint, check out the book Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint.

Where is the line?

I was training a SharePoint newcomer last week in New York. My trainee had a strong developer background, and just needed to get familiar with SharePoint for an upcoming job. As I was explaining things to her, I started to talk about a few custom front-end solutions that I’d built, and she latched on to those (coming from the developer world). But as I was explaining things to her, we started to discuss the legitimacy of doing some of these things in SharePoint. When does it change from a “SharePoint solution” to a “solution that uses SharePoint as a relational database”?

Let’s say you are using jQuery, SPServices, and maybe the Google Charts API. You can hook into a list, display a really great chart, and put it on a SharePoint page. That’s a great use of SharePoint. It’s a single page, accessing a single list, and enhancing the experience for the end user. Now say you have several lists that need charts. So we put several charts on the page. Easy. But how about when it comes time to organize all of these charts (say we have 30)? Now we need to add some UI elements that organize the charts in, say, tabs, or maybe an accordion. Ok, that’s great. But now instead of hardcoding in all of our lists to our scripts, we want one list just to organize our other lists. So now our code is much cleaner, we get all of our chart references from one list, and we organize it on the page with one cleaner, bigger script. At this point we have now made a list into a relational connection to other lists. But this is fine, even SharePoint allows this, right? (think Lookup fields)

So where is the line? How many lists must be connected before we pump the brakes and say, “wait…things are getting a little hairy”. See, in my opinion, SharePoint is a great place to store data. It’s also a great place to store data from external sources. It’s a great collection point for everything from a SQL server with lists of students, or to a connection to a 3rd party Gradebok. That’s what SharePoint is great at, being a central point of contact for many different systems. So the logical next step is to build things on top of this central point in order to interact with the data, right?

My personal line

All of my solutions are front-end, nothing server-side for me. But I recently ran into the limit of what I felt comfortable doing using javascript and SharePoint. A client of mine was building a re-enrollment process for the following school year. This process involved parents logging in, seeing their children on the page, and then initiating a re-enrollment form for each child. The form was build using javascript, jQuery, SPServices, and a host of other little plugins (for validation, navigation, etc). It was based on at least 3 lists, one that stored parent data, one that stored student data, and a connector list that connected families together. Functionally, the app worked. There were bugs like anything else, but overall, it worked.

Here’s the problem I had with it. In order to give parents rights to see their data, as well as their child(ren)’s data, we needed to give them access to the parent and student lists. This meant that for that period of time, all parents (if they knew the address) had access to all the data for all other parents. Now, this school is a fairly tight-knit community. There was nothing more in those lists that couldn’t be found out through the directory and doing a little digging. But nonetheless, it was all right there, in an easily exportable format. The intranet is password protected, but who is to say a parent with malicious intent couldn’t have really caused a headache for a lot of people?

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that the list is obscured somewhere or somehow the parents couldn’t directly access it. Well that still leaves a hole on the javascript side. Because it’s javascript, all of my code is loaded in the browser for any tech-savvy user to check out and study. If they weren’t deterred by sloppy code :), then they might be able to get in there and see what’s happening. At very least they can check the requests sent through the console. Once they have this code, they could modify it however they want and run it on their browser. How about if they could figure out how to impersonate somebody else by hardcoding in a username? What if they figured out a way to delete all other re-enrollment forms?

All this aside, we weren’t really worried because a) the time period was so short, and b) the stakes weren’t too high. That said, this was definitely a clear line for me in where I stop using SharePoint. Keep in mind, that’s when “I” stop using SharePoint. A back-end developer could have a field day with this project. Put everything server-side, secure it to the logged-in user, and you’ve got a much better system.

When to stop designing

The other question I have is: how far do we veer from the ‘spirit’ of SharePoint? Branding a master page, making a site look ‘not like SharePoint’ is one thing. But how about these custom solutions? I generally start with a blank HTML file, add in the javascript I need, and then wrap it in some ASP goodness to make it look like a page on my site. But how about the UI elements? Do we use SharePoint list views, or do we built our own repeating table with HTML and javascript? What should we do? Do we use SharePoint forms? Do we only go so far as to create forms in InfoPath? Do we completely customize every aspect of the form because we can “do it better”? I think at some point we need to leave SharePoint alone, let it do what it does, and relegate ourselves to ‘enhancing’, not always ‘replacing’.

SharePoint has its faults, many, many faults. But I think we are doing ourselves an injustice to use SharePoint for some of these solutions. While we may be thinking, “look what I can do with SharePoint,” maybe we should take a second and think “should this be done in SharePoint”? There are faster ways to do things. There are more efficient ways to go about linking data from relational tables.

So where is the line? Where is the line for you? When do you stop developing front-end and go a different route? What are your personal limitations?

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used SharePoint for more than eight years.

In the 10+ years of being in traditional IT, I have never once heard of a happy customer of SharePoint, only happy contractors and IT personnel who feel safe in their jobs because SharePoint never quite works. I’ve even tried to find a happy customer. I couldn’t. 

This is probably harsh criticism to some readers, but in my honest view, SharePoint is a system that only really works for IT departments and the contractors who develop SharePoint, because the solution is folded into the existing enterprise agreements. It’s free because it wouldn’t have value on its own. There are no happy customers of SharePoint, only happy contractors.

Let’s talk UX. Employees today have little time for systems that don’t address their needs. If a team needs the ability to share files and that system restricts them, then IT has failed. SharePoint doesn’t really help in today’s world of mobile access, collaboration and sharing of content. 

SharePoint doesn’t provide real workflow so common practices are always having to be redone. This frustrates end-users and always makes IT look less than capable, which is unfair, because it’s SharePoint.

When systems require lengthy timelines to spin up, require additional expert staff to create and then ultimately under-deliver solutions to end users who then feel constrained, force-fed and unable to use the system, then the only conclusion I can make is that the product is sub-standard. While Microsoft has no doubt put tremendous resources into developing SharePoint (and is now saddled with a massive contractor partner channel that refuses to change its ways), the world has moved on. 

SharePoint requires too much administrator-level effort in order to launch. Typical installations of SharePoint require conversations regarding hardware, storage and access permissions which slow business down. SharePoint requires all of these things because the architecture is — in IT time — ancient and inflexible. Once those lengthy conversations are finished then the actual work begins in order to ensure SharePoint can function. This takes business time, money, and contractors are usually very happy in making sure everything is just right. 

Software should not require additional effort to operate effectively. Business should not need additional outsourced expertise in order to get a fileshare running. Then there are the operating concerns of security, governance and collaboration. SharePoint offers only read or read/write ability to files which is far less than competitors offer for a lower price. 

SharePoint isn’t necessarily any more secure than anything else and doesn’t offer the level of governance required for many companies. It cannot report in-depth user activity or provide policy automation out of the box. Ultimately SharePoint offers less than what you need for more than what you bargained.

Competitors are solidly in the market who offer better workflow, security, governance and collaboration. Box.com offers higher degrees of collaboration AND Office integration than SharePoint. 

If you’re a business that needs to collaborate on content, and has the desire to share that content outside your building to your executives on their phones or vendors in other locations, SharePoint is not the solution for you.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?