Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats 225
ericatcw writes "Taking a page out of McDonalds 'billions and billions served,' Microsoft says it reaps $1.3 billion a year from more than 100 million users of its SharePoint collab app. But some suggest that the figures are consciously inflated by Microsoft sales tactics in order to boost the appearance of momentum for the platform, reports Computerworld. A recent survey suggests that less than a fourth of users licensed for SharePoint actually use it. SharePoint particularly lags as a platform for Web sites, according to the same survey, a situation Microsoft hopes to fix with the upcoming SharePoint 2010."
Well, I guess it's business as usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't use Share Point and I don't especially like Microsoft but just to put things in perspective:
We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)
A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.
Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I'm a bit of a Microsoft fan, I just can't see putting my data on their servers. It'll go Sidekick for sure.
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We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, ....
Well, there's another side. Some actually under report the numbers to give that exclusive, elite, snob appeal; which then just adds to the appeal, which then more people sign on to use it. Example? I think that's what the BSD folks are doing.
Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
Irrelevant. SharePoint isn't an end-user application; it's a web-based application, and is mostly implemented on intranets. The number of SharePoint users can't be measured by web metrics. SharePoint is occasionally used on internet-facing sites, but it is licensed differently.
Microsoft is claiming they have sold some amount of SharePoint client licenses and therefore have that many SharePoint users; the argument is the number of actual users is significantly smaller than the number of sold licenses.
Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, if that's what they're doing, who cares? They know how many licenses they've sold, and they know how many seats those licenses cover. They can't possibly know how many of those seats are actively used, so of course the only useful data they can share is the first set and ignore the second.
Saying they have "millions of users" isn't particularly meaningful, but at least in this case it's not really deceptive, either.
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Ah, but as its a web-based server thing, how can they know how many users are served by those sites? I may have sharepoint installed, but used by 2 users - me n Dave. Or it could be serving the entire 4000-person corporate.
So I expect they extrapolate from sharepoint sales, and Office sales - everyone using Word uses Sharepoint, right - they bought a licence at the same time, therefore.... Standard marketing-logic for 'we sold loads'. I'm sure the cash sales figures are correct however.
Of course, it also do
Sorry, but wrong. (Score:3, Funny)
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I am stuck in this endless recursion (Score:3, Funny)
A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.
I applied your correction factor to the number 2 you mentioned and that changed the correction factor to 1. Now that means your correction factor is back to 2. Now I am stuck in endless recursion and am going to run out stack and coredump.
Those Numbers are correct, Seriously! (Score:2, Insightful)
Licensed copies of the software $100,000
Software and development products $500,000.
Training. $150,000
Hire more people. $1,000,000
New hardware $500,000.
Billions from thousands
Then start developing. 10 times as long to get a product out.
So how much would a GNU project cost now?
Ubuntu server Free :) Free
Web Page Tutuorial for setting up Joomullalalala
Hardware, probably donated junk Free
Cost of operation, Electricity.
Hone those OSS skills boy's. With the Whitehouse bailing out mofo's left and right they'll ne
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Where?
Vegas Baby!
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When work pays for travel, we take it. Vegas to be marketed at by a company? Sure. California for a Visual Basic conference? Sign me up!
Don't ever assume that people go to a conference somewhere because they want/like/care about the product or the conference. A week out of town, expenses paid, and nobody to make sure you actually go? That's what business is all about baby!
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Plus, it's good for your career. While the other drones were just adding value to the company, you were "making yourself more valuable". Snicker.
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Wait, a SharePoint conference? In Vegas? With blackjack, and hookers? Forget the SharePoint....
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We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users,
Really? I find it hard to think of a web stats service or log file analyser that does not show traffic from search engines separately.
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Then I am sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about !
Google (at least addsense does for sure) for one makes requests (not all requests) faking browser headers to make sure that you don't do page cloaking. Other "stealth" search engines do the same (intelligence services, tools especially designed to artificially boost your web trafic, etc.).
"Unique visitors" are usually counted with a timeout (the lower the timeout, the more visits you get!) that makes you counted like 10 "unique visitors" if you
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Windows SharePoint Services is installed with SBS, but WSS is actually "free" (as in it costs nothing extra to use on a properly licensed Windows Server.) I doubt these numbers include SBS client access licenses.
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Breaking news! Marketing people lied to make their product look good!
A big company inflating numbers to look better? (Score:4, Funny)
That's just preposterous! I can tell you for sure that over 5 trillion servers run sharepoint, and not one of them has ever crashed.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Precisely. SharePoint is remarkably difficult to integrate and setup. I blame it on their insistence on using Integrated Security. Anyway, that's just my impression, I'm no SharePoint expert.
Screw Sharepoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. It's overly complex, and doesn't really make anything easier for the vast majority of users. It's a nice IDEA, but in practice, it just gets in the way. It's one of those things that big companies buy and use thinking that it will solve their communication problems, when in fact all it does is create different and worse problems.
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I have definately used more user-friendly content management systems.
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I've used at least one less user-friendly content management system - Tridion.
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Drupal
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It's a nice IDEA, but in practice, it just gets in the way.
O-M-G it's Clippy for web servers. It looks like you're trying to post that document on a secure intranet....
RUUUUUN!!!!
Re:Screw Sharepoint (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, we use Sharepoint at our company, a reasonably large global SI. I see it as a necessary pain, myself. We share a lot of material across more than thirty countries, and I don't think sending that much SMB directory detail around to do the same thing via file shares is a particularly good use of time or bandwidth. Just listing directories on a server - geez, even the servers themselves - is a slow process when you're on the other side of the world, and we have a decent networking budget and some very, very good network people.
That said, it's still a slow and uncomfortable alternative. The UI is a bit below par for anyone who has used a decent content management system, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is it's slow. You can learn the clicks if the response is good, but delays get people all bound up in navigation.
It's based on SQL Server as a storage medium. That's a decent enough database, but it's still an RDB, and the delays in setting up connections to that database, plus all the TCP overhead bouncing from router to router in establishing that connection adds seconds to your session, seconds you wouldn't feel if the files were stored locally (to say nothing of the compression-decompression overheads).
I think there's a fundamental misconfiguration to most Sharepoint sites, and that's the major source of its clunkyness. Using a database designed for speedy delivery of TPC-sized transactions, and using it to store whole large documents may be the best way to get Microsoft-based content available on a Microsoft-shaped browser perhaps, but it seems to me there's a lot of indexing and leaf balancing to get in the way of really crisp performance unless you're very clever with the database and have a lot more RAM available to cache it than appears rational on the surface.
I'm not sure if there's a lot of scope to improve that, but some would certainly be appreciated. I think it needs a custom database designed to purpose, not the general purpose SQL Server engine. Just a feeling* I have.
Cutting the number of hops somehow would help - perhaps a store-local and replicate model would do a better job; something like the block-level geographically distinct replication of fault tolerant disk farms perhaps (Didn't Exchange public folders work on this principle once?) but I don't know how I'd go about doing that.
*A feeling perhaps helped along by 10 years as a DBA, and a year or so as a Sharepoint SME and a few years as a network engineer (basically I know just barely enough to be dangerous with it - I could be old and out of touch).
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Over complex for sure.. and not really used - I was at a place that moved to sharepoint. They might as well have kept on using SMB network shares because there was precisely zero difference other than they moved some of the directories around.
Didn't find out until years later that it has some kind of web/intranet component as well. Had a look at it.. my god, the UI from hell. No wonder it's not used.
Re:Screw Sharepoint (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW ... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.
If you're stuck with it because your company bought it and expects you to use it, then my honest advice is to, man-up, take a training course [dell.com] and learn to use it.
Gee, you don't by any chance work for Dell [google.com], do you?
Re:Screw Sharepoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Screw Sharepoint (Score:5, Informative)
In my(admittedly somewhat limited) experience with it, sharepoint seemed like a mess. Pretty much the slipshod bastard child of a wiki full of office documents and a half-assed collaboration/versioning mechanism. It probably feels like the second coming of Raptor Jesus if your collaboration mechanism has traditionally been either "just map to 'new project docs' on 'data2' and remember to number your new version" or "let me forward you the email chain and attachments"; but it was not a pleasant change after using real tools.
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Riiight. So it's Google Wave for a Microsoft shop? I'll pass.
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The problem is that it's sold as something that it's not. It's touted as a platform that can integrate with all the stuff you already have, but the reality is that it's more an application for basic document management and simple collaboration. Maybe to make a simple dashboard or portal. That's about it. Beyond that you have a lot of unfulfilled promises.
SharePoint is not the best of breed product for anything that it does. There are better blogs, better wikis, better document management systems, and b
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I'll be setting up a Wave server as soon as google releases the source.
Uh, Google is already publishing the source for it: "wave-protocol" [google.com] on Google code. I don't think it's production-ready yet though.
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That's the federation protocol. It works.. but there's no web UI so it's not so useful. I suspect that in theory with that and the console UI you could get a pukka wave user to invite you to a wave, but not worked out how yet.
Plumtree (Score:2)
It could be worse, you could be forced to use Lotus Notes or Plumbtree,
It could be even worse: rather than your company forcing you to use Plumtree, it could be your country [myschool.lu].
Re:Screw Sharepoint (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent 4 weeks learning about SharePoint. There are two tiers of functionality: that you can get from plain jane Sharepoint, and that you get from MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server).
Unless you fork over the money for MOSS, you do not get any functionality over what you would get from Plone, an open source product. As an added bonus, Plone is far easier for non-technical folks to use than Sharepoint - so instead of dedicating IT resources to creating sites, you push that cost center off to the users and free up your resources for something else.
MOSS is prohibitively expensive. For 2500 seats, you're looking at around $400k to start plus $130k/year.
For (far less than) that amount, you could hire a developer to add MOSS-like features to Plone. The MOSS features really don't produce enough ROI to justify the expense, unless you are looking at adding third party BI applications (many of which require MOSS) that may or may not produce ROI by their own merits.
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if you glance at a program, decide not to bother figuring out how to use it and determine that it sucks only because it's put out by Microsoft then you don't have much of an opinion.
You're describing most of the comments here today. I know that there must be some technical and usability failings, but if Slashdot had a filter to scrub out anecdotal MS hate ramblings, there would not be much left in this story thread.
We use SharePoint, and as a *user*, I really don't have any issues with it, it beats what we had before here at AMC (Air Mobility Command). There are some minor things that I don't like, but nothing that would push me over the edge into a frothy mouthed frenzy. For those th
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I concur regarding tikiwiki, we migrated from tikiwiki to twiki, which seems much better so far. I haven't delved into twiki's code, but that's because I haven't had to.
So at my company Corporate uses sharepoint 2006 which is abysmal. search stinks, pretty much the only thing it's good at is storing/sharing word documents, pp presentations, etc.
The techs use twiki, which is much nicer.
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The main problem I have with sharepoint is finding anything.
The search option doesn't seem attached to the content at my corporation.
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You didn't need to reply. If you tell someone to STFG, they'll call you an ass and consider your argument to be invalid. If you give someone a direct link, they'll call you subjective and invalidate your argument. This is the tubez, get used to it.
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FWIW ... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.
And a project manager may be the most complex user Microsoft has. When you set it up right, MS Project Server has a lot of really useful, interesting integration products. And it uses Sharepoint. With that you can push tasks to users anywhere on the Active Directory and have them show up as Outlook tasks. People can update their tasks inside Outlook and have them posted to the project schedule as actuals, with a very low click overhead. Possibly their best, if not their most popular product.
That little
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In my experience it's worse than a flat shared network drive because no one who didn't put the document there can ever find it.
We use it mostly because we got it free with our existing MS license agreement. Not a single person I've talked to likes it or can find anything on it.
It's search capabilities are completely worthless. To the point that I once proposed installing google desktop on the sharepoint server as a workaround. I didn't realize that there were permissions setup within sharepoint that made
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Aren't there Wikis that do that already?
All web statistics are lies (Score:2)
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While Firefox, by contrast, is licensed TO THE WORLD! [census.gov]
MS Lies About Their Xbox Sales. No Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Both Nintendo and Sony report actual 'sold to customer' for their sales numbers.
Microsoft, however, consistently lies about their sales figures for the Xbox by using 'shipped to retailer' numbers in order to make their worldwide sales numbers look larger than they actually are.
They even went so far as to flood the retail channel a couple holiday seasons ago with extra Xbox 360 consoles by leveraging their other Microsoft products just so they could put out press releases claiming huge 'sales'. There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel.
No surprise that they are doing the same type of installed base/sales inflating. Standard operating procedure for Microsoft.
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The only really silly sales claim I have seen this gen was a few from Sony http://www.penny-arcade. [penny-arcade.com]
Citation needed, A.C. (Score:3)
There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel
And your proof for this is to be found - where?
Alone among the three major videogame consoles, sales of the PS3 are down about 19% from November 2007, according to the latest stats from the NPD Group. Sony was only able to sell 378,000 PS3s this November, compared to 466,000 last year.
And the problem for Sony isn't the recession, it's the PS3. Microsoft put up r
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You realized that 'shipped to retailer' is extremely close to 'sold to customers' for anything that has already been released right?
Do you think MS is sending Walmart and BestBuy Xboxes which they are just storing in some big warehouse somewhere so MS can look good? Throwing MS some extra up front cash to help them out, while they sit on the stock?
Shipped to retailer vs sold to customer are only only different by the number sitting unsold, which is going to remain fairly consistent through out the lifetim
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'Shipped to retailers' is never anything close to 'sold to consumers'. It's a shell game. That's why people build
Not Surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
Because it only seems to be sold to 'enterprises' that means that the wider world isn't using it at all and many software developers won't be writing for it either. As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.
Re:Not Surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Large organizations that use SharePoint probably already have a large virtual machine farm, and would have used separate VMs in any case.
People are definitely developing for SharePoint. Most development is oriented for enterprise use, however.
SharePoint has mindshare within large organizations.
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You're still talking about additional server licensing and administration.
Which means that nobody is developing for it. Whenever you have a product that is only sold to enterprises rather than to the wider world it is very, very difficult for external developers to l
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Big companies have big IT departments to do these things.
There's enough of a market for third-party addons t
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You're still talking about additional server licensing and administration.
Virtual is its own reward.
VM's are very useful for fast rollback, deployment and load balancing, and in my opinion that's equally valuable to the hardware they save (and we've seen 20:1 min, more like 50:1 with occasional 100:1 server packings). The extra admin is offset by much faster MTTR (Changes crash system? Close it and reboot previous image).
The real problem is the proliferation of VM disk images. They grow amazingly numerous. Get a good data de-duplication system to help with that.
Microsoft has p
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The last I looked at it you *have* to run it as a default site, so that means you need yet another server
If you install it correctly, by following the installation guides (or even just the prompts on screen), SharePoint leaves your default site well alone - you can either install your SharePoint sites using host headers, or different port numbers.
Because it only seems to be sold to 'enterprises' that means that the wider world isn't using it at all and many software developers won't be writing for it either. As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.
I think you will find that SharePoint development is a huge market, and is expanding every day. From my personal experience, demand is high in both small and large businesses.
Yep, SharePoint is a failure.....oh brother...... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether every single SharePoint CAL that was purchased is actually in use, is irrelevant to the point of ridicule.
Did they sell it? Did someone BUY it? THEN COUNT it, baby!
Instead of bitching, someone should be crediting Microsoft for how they manage their CALs and bundling.
This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.
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The issue isn't whether the sales numbers are good. The issue is whether it is really successful - are that many people actually using it? There's a world of difference between, say 80% happy, productive customers and 15% happy, productive customers. When marketing is using these numbers to imply that your own purchase would open the gates of success, what those numbers really mean are important and worth criticizing.
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if people spent even 1/2 the time working on competing apps rather then whinging about MS, OSS might actaully make some headway.
If they paid for it, sure (Score:2)
But if it just got thrown into a package, then no.
MS Paint Analogy is faulty (Score:2)
This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.
The story isn't merely to begrudge MS its sales. The point here is that even perceived momentum will push more users into Sharepoint on the assumption that a large user base is using it, which will be interpretted as Sharepoint being a system that will be any easy sell:
Such a marketing approach will mis-lead IT departments away from knowledge management systems that really solve the problems that Sharepoint does not
Then why lie? (Score:2)
Any way you look at those numbers the momentum is huge, lop 50% off, hell lop 75% off and it is still a massive number for a portal/collaboration product.
You make a great point about how large the user base for sharepoint is. However, if the numbers are so great, why would they need to inflate them? If the article above is correct, the vendor's sales and marketing experts believe that the sales boon to be had from making the the user base appear larger than it is overrides the embarrassment of making up the figures.
This would contrast with the scenario that you sketch out where sharepoint has really penetrated to such a degree that no lying on momentum is re
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Dear Microsoft Corporation,
I am considering upgrading from MS Paint to Sharepoint. I am concerned, however, about the ease of use of Sharepoint versus MS Paint. I have heard that Sharepoint can be complex and may take a long time to learn. I mostly draw funny captions on pictures of cats. Is Sharepoint the best platform for me?
LoL I can haz laf!
Because, strangely, Sharepoint might be the best product for that application. Lots of little document files that need a tiny bit of post-store metadata -- yep, that'll work.
New low in journalism? (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats
But some suggest...
A recent survey suggests...
suggest From Meriam Webster:
synonyms suggest, imply, hint, intimate, insinuate mean to convey an idea indirectly. suggest may stress putting into the mind by association of ideas, awakening of a desire, or initiating a train of thought . imply is close to suggest but may indicate a more definite or logical relation of the unexpressed idea to the expressed . hint implies the use of slight or remote suggestion with a mini
Small Business Server (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).
Hell, I can't even figure out what it's good for.
Re:Small Business Server (Score:5, Interesting)
"you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it. "
Ok, let me rephrase that. "I can't figure out what it's good for with regard to my clients."
And I can't. I know what it does. I just can't, with a straight face, anyway, recommend it as a way to improve anything they do without a) increasing costs, b) increasing complexity, and c) limiting their options. The customer isn't always an idiot and they won't always spend money on something they don't really need or want. (except in the case where it is bundled)
My point was.... MS is probably counting all of those unused, bundled installations as users.
Oh... and as it stands, we make a comfortable living selling non-MS solutions, more specifically tailored to our customer's needs.
The ruthless capitalist in me thinks that pushing SharePoint would probably just cut into our margins.
Not that I'm a ruthless capitalist or anything.
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you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it.
Unfortunately SP offers very little to the casual user. To that user, the only important difference from a SMB share is versions. If you don't care about them (and most people, in most businesses, don't [*]) then there SP has zero advantage to you personally.
[*] Why hardly anyone uses versions? Because that's how humans work in real life, and because it is inconvenient (and outright dangerous) to copy versio
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The opportunity for increased revenue sits right there in front of you, and if you had any sense, you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it.
I have several drums of ebola virus sitting in my warehouse. I guess I would be an IDIOT not to take advantage of this opportunity to make money by SHOWING my clients what they can do with the EBOLA VIRUS.
Easy for users, hell for admins (Score:5, Informative)
I administer the free version of Sharepoint at work. (sharepoint 3.0)
It's yet another tool from Microsoft where -
All the data is stored in one large impenetrable database blob - most content is stored in two dimensional "lists", which somewhat limits what you can do in terms of building online forms etc. ALL the list data is stored in the one table, which makes it non-intuitive to make that data visible outside of sharepoint.
It's easy for end users to generate lists, calendars, annoucement pages, document stores, surveys etc etc to their hearts content, so you end up with a big sprawling mess if it's poorly administered
it's easy to add canned 'web parts" but impossble to alter the functionality of those parts. eg, try to prevent staff from seeing survey results, for example. (yes, it's possible but it's not exactly intuitive, and extremely hard without the assitance of Sharepoint designer, which was not free until recently)
Microsoft keep changing the search engine strategy for the product; Search has mysteriously failed on our implementation with few error messages to provide clues.
It doesn't really work properly unless you integrate it with Active directory, Microsoft Office, Infopath, and ideally MS Exchange. Vendor lockin for the win!
So why are we using it? Our staff love it, as it's easy for the end user to figure out; but it's an absolute pig to administer.
In terms of usage stats, I note it comes with every copy of Windows small business server. Perhaps they're including that in the usage stats?
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I have worked fairly extensively with Sharepoint and used it as a platform for developing several different kinds of applications. That being said...
You hit the mark on most of your points
* Yes, the database is impenetrable (and it supposed to be - you aren't supposed to muck with it) - keep in mind this isn't an open source product
* Lots of the features are too dumb for programmers/power users but easy for regular users to muck up - this is a governance issue and all "portals" can suffer from this
* Canned
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Open source alternative (Score:5, Informative)
I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!
I use SharePoint ... (Score:3, Funny)
to reduce the unused space on my hard drive
SharePoint is nothing but PAIN, PAIN, PAIN unless. (Score:2, Informative)
Unless you need the most simplistic, minimal workflow, 90s table based GUI, and wanna avoid developers like a plague..
I am NOT alone, read this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/256407/what-are-your-biggest-complaints-about-sharepoint
SharePoint isn't always reliable (Score:5, Informative)
I know that Law Firms had a conference to use Sharepoint for Legal Practice Management Software. I wrote an original ASP based Docket Calendar, and Law Firms want to move their Docket Calendars to Sharepoint. I can tell you that when you have a law firm and you want reliability, Microsoft isn't always the best choice. Some law firms still use Wordperfect and other non-MS software because they have found MS software to be low quality in performance and reliability. But the majority of big law firms are hooked on Microsoft for everything as Microsoft bundles software into neat packages for them and provides paid support for everything. The big law firms think that putting everything on Microsoft is a safe bet, but the law firm I worked at went millions of dollars over budget because of support calls, replacing hardware, replacing software, and hiring consultants when Microsoft could not give any answers or solutions to our problems. Back then it was Windows 2000, Office 2000, and Visual BASIC 6.0, and ASP 3.0, but the move to Dotnet only made matters worse. Finally Microsoft is working out the bugs in Dotnet, but in doing so they have created new ones. Sharepoint 3.0 was a nifty program until Microsoft filled it with bloated features that it needs Windows 2008 Server because it won't run on older Windows Servers forcing companies to pay for upgrades to Windows 2008 Server and new server hardware, just like the last time I used Windows Server and Microsoft software in a legal environment.
Keep in mind these are "hidden costs" that do not count many wasted work hours trying to work around the MS bugs in programming, or trying to restore a crashed server or workstation. That expenses can reach record amounts as well as have downtime for the entire firm.
There are only two known FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint [osalt.com] but Wiki sites are usually better and faster and in most cases free to use. I tried getting Wiki implemented in my former work places only to be laughed at. But a Wiki search is faster than a Sharepoint search, and a Wiki need not use Windows Server and can run on Linux, *BSD Unix, or Mac OSX or some other platform to save money.
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Your link completely misses out on many other wiki options (mediaWiki, TikiWiki, Drupal, Plone, Joomla... the list is large), and the info is dated (Alfresco has released 3.0 for quite some time).
I would strongly recommend actually doing a good options analysis on alternatives to Sharepoint, and make sure you focus on features you actually need or plan on needing in the near
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks I found the website http://plone.org/ [plone.org] is that it? I'll add it to my list for Sharepoint FOSS alternatives.
Ya think? (Score:2, Funny)
my anecdotal experience (Score:5, Interesting)
That does not mean that there isn't interest at a lot of these companies for SharePoint, though. It's just that the total cost after purchasing the licenses and then paying someone to implement it properly is too cost prohibitive for the types of companies that would benefit from using it.
Furthermore, there really are not very many "guru-level" people on SharePoint. There's barely any "adequate" talent for SharePoint... I hear it all the time from a lot of my peers that there's not even anyone out in the field trying to get a practice started up around it in this very large, very wealthy (per captia) city. Excuses range from "lack of demand" to "no one to do the work", to the ever popular "everyone is only seeing the tip of the iceberg" that Microsoft is so apt to spin.
So, that's my perspective as someone in the realm of that field... whatever that is worth.
Can I get a "well DUH!"? (Score:2)
It's been known for a while that numbers on stuff like their CRM and Sharepoint aren't based on actual USER base. Merely how many licenses are out in the wild including guestimates of pirate copies.. This means, if you have an Action Pack subscription, you're counted. If you're on MSDN, you're counted. If you're a warez hound pirating this stuff in south-central Spotlsylvania, yup, you're counted too-ski.
So it comes as exactly zero surprise that the numbers are so baked that someone's considering an int
Are they counting zombies? (Score:2, Interesting)
My 2 cents on SharePoint (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299961&cid=28668819 [slashdot.org]
Version Control for Binary Documents Etc. (Score:2)
While I am not a fan of SharePoint at all, I understand that one thing it does is provide versioning for MS Office files, such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Now, I am used to version control from CVS, Subversion, and Git, and I think this is immensely valuable.
Having worked in various organizations which use MS Office extensively, I see that a lot of time is wasted figuring out which is the latest version of a document, where it is, what the differences are between that version and some version
The hidden value of Sharepoint (Score:4, Funny)
A lot of people bashing Sharepoint, no surprise there, but here's something you need to be aware of. Sharepoint is where projects go to die. Seriously, nothing kills a project faster, and more quietly, than putting it on Sharepoint.
Dead projects may seem like a bad idea, but we all know that not every project deserves life. Take a server, install Sharepoint/Sharepoint Services on it, and wait. When you get "that project", the one no one wants to touch with a 10 foot pole, that's when it's time for Sharepoint. You can make a case for using it for just about anything. Collaboration is a very powerful buzzword.
Setup a bare bones template site to use for anything like this that comes along, customize it for the walking dead project in question, give all the users rights, a brief tutorial on how to login and use it, then wait. If they want more training, say that you will look into off-site or online training options to stall. You'll find that a few eager beavers will upload a few documents, customize a few things, maybe even send out a workflow or something, but all activity on the site should wither and die within two weeks. If you happen to get some savant who just thinks it's great and is trying to spur everyone else into using it, make him and admin of the site. That will sufficiently bog him down. Within 6 months, they'll be back to printing out emails and meeting in person to avoid having to use the site.
You're in maze of twisty web pages, all alike (Score:3, Informative)
We have a corporate sharepoint site that is supposed to help us share documents and collaborate. In reality, it is a confusing maze of pages with way too much embedded functionality.
In summary, I hate it!
Reality Check # 5342 (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem here is that Microsoft includes addons in their mainstream software and expects users and admins to be fully up-to-speed with the implementation/roll-out, training with the expectation that it is a lock-step process without too much regard to why they put it there in the first place.
It's a mind-set game IMHO where you have to closely follow MS thought processes, jargon and developmental time-line to make it work effectively, even though you don't necessarily want it. In other words you have to know what MS is thinking all the time and there is no easy way to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on courses, reading, subscribing, trialing and the whole shebang.
It's a 'top down' implementation. They think of it, program it, sell it or give it away and expect everyone to use it.
I think what would be better would be more emphasis on what the user wants in a 'bottom up' approach.
What's the point in trying to change office practice and procedure when it is either not necessary, too hard to implement and train for? Or is it another waste of certificate paper and gold stars?
How much collaboration do you really need? A lot depends on management practices, when it is rare nowadays to find individuals who can complete a task without sharing or intervention as opposed to unnecessary and pointless team work which may be counter-productive.
My $0.99c worth
Re:Yawn. (Score:5, Funny)
There's always this: http://www.alfresco.com/ [alfresco.com] though I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I can't really comment on how good it is.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Sharepoint replaced a wiki we had at work. We had a wiki that people liked that we constantly improved.
The edict was to move all the documents into word format and upload them into sharepoint.
Now no one ever looks at those documents.
So we didn't have a problem which was solved by moving to a solution that no one wanted and no one uses.
Re: (Score:2)
"Now no one ever looks at those documents."
So either there's nothing of importance in the documents or the workers aren't doing their job anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So either there's nothing of importance in the documents or the workers aren't doing their job anymore.
Or they've reverted to an ad-hoc system of keeping documents on their local filesystems, and emailing them to each other. It creates problems with versions, and "searching" becomes a social networking exercise (or an email to 'all') -- but if workers find it less painful than Sharepoint, that's what they'll do.
In my workplace there's an official Sharepoint site, and dozens of guerilla wiki servers -- Twiki in some cases, abused Fitnesse servers in others.
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, man, "real life" is going to be a rude awakening for you after college (or high school?).