Admit it. Take the hit. Somebody did something stupid.
One of the things I find sorely lacking in the SharePoint Community is opinionated op-ed pieces. I want to know why something sucks, why one product is objectively better than another, why SharePoint implementations crash and burn. I don’t want this one anymore: “SharePoint sucks because… (choose your poison)”. SharePoint does what it does. Who made the decisions to deploy this thing without a proper game plan, anyway?
I hear it every single day on blogs, twitter, articles… people moaning about how much SharePoint sucks, how it can’t even do the simplest things without jumping through flaming circus hoops. “SharePoint sucks when it comes to Social Software. SharePoint blows chunks for finding even the simplest things. SharePoint navigation is useless.” The finger is always pointed at the software. God forbid there should be an actual human making decisions around how the product was deployed.
Let’s talk about that abit. Who made the business decisions that would allow such a large scale piece of software to be implemented without a proper plan for End User education, incremental rollout, without even the basic foundations of Information Architecture? Who’s steering the SharePoint ship? What’s your responsibility in all this?
Along that train of thought, I was extremely pleased to see Joel’s article, “Why isn’t my SharePoint Environment Social???“, dated August 26th. I like it. Somebody needs to quit blaming the software and take the hit for making bad deployment decisions.
Those who have deployed their 2007 just like they did their 2001 and their 2003 environment simply by upgrading it, or simply didn’t spend any time figuring out how to take advantage of their features may feel like their environment is FLAT or they are feeling the chaos of a flat environment.
Here’s my description of what’s gone wrong…
- You can’t find anything
- You can’t tell who owns anything
- You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old or what has changed
- It’s all disconnected
There’s one word to describe it. JUNK. It’s a total mess. It’s far from social, it’s ANTI-Social, and it’s that way not due to the software, but due to the deployment decisions or lack thereof.
Joel Oleson
Yeah baby! Call ‘em out! Who made the decisions or lack thereof?
I have seen implementations where SharePoint sites have been setup with a simple cut and paste job from a file server… 150,000 files in a hierarchical folder structure. The End User pushes back, rightfully so, with “How is this any better than what we already have?”
That’s a good question. Who made the decision to do that? Who deployed SharePoint without a plan for informing people why SharePoint was chosen, without showing people the simple ways it can save massive amounts of time, without setting up even the most basic Information Architecture to get the system to do what it’s supposed to do?
For the people who are the mainstay of EndUserSharePoint.com, Power Users, Site Admin and Site Collection Admin, there isn’t much you can do at your level other than clean up your own sandbox to show people how it can be done. That shouldn’t stop you from pushing upwards. Get yourself in place. Get your local environment together. Understand the ramifications of the decisions being made at the local level.
Joel’s article lists ten questions your deployment team should ask when it comes to making SharePoint “Social Ready” in your company.
- Is your environment Internet Accessible? Is it easily accessible?
- Have you deployed My sites?
- How rich are your User Profiles?
- Are you using SharePoint Search, Federated Search with People Search?
- Using Blogs & Wikis?
- Enabled your Presence Integration with LCS or OCS (& Telephony) & Exchange for Out of Office?
- Is your SharePoint deployment easy to navigate?
- Are you expiring sites or content?
- Are you using Tagging?
- Are you using webparts to keep your sites information dynamic?
I’m sure Joel agrees this isn’t the end all / be all of lists, but it’s definitely a starting point.
What can you do as a Power User/ Site Admin to implement some of these features? What can you do as a Site Collection Admin to push ideas up the food chain to get a coherent strategy in place to make SharePoint work for you?
Is SharePoint perfect? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Let’s agree to stop blaming the software, though, and start taking responsibility for the things that we can do, for the changes we can implement at a local level, and get on with the business of doing business.
The soapbox is now open for the next speaker…
Well put by both Joel and yourself Mark.
In my case I rolled out MOSS 2 years ago and did a “forklift” migration of my SPS 2003 content into that new environment. At the time I wasn’t aware enough of things like “governance” and only had the slightest clue about what “taxonomy” truly meant.
2 years later and every day I look at my existing MOSS implementation the more I destest what I have done. Who’s fault was it? Mine without a doubt I should have taken more time to research and learn but didn’t due to time constraints forced on me by my IT Director. I have been working diligently to solve that issue and re-architect and re-deploy our portal solution.
Where I find myself now is where I think a lot of folks in similar situations find themselves. I have an IT Director that wants to re-write MOSS because he doesn’t understand how it works and doesn’t care enough to learn. I find myself working on mandated projects that have great intentions and awesome potential yet get shot down because I have nobody to champion the necessary cultural change to steer my fellow employees in the right direction and show them how the things I am doing would benefit and help them.
Ultimately I know that the largest problem I face is trying to do things from the bottom up, no project champion, no real support from a “C” level executive, and saddled with a department head that sees the potential for SharePoint to make him look good and sets unrealistic goals/milestones despite everything I tell and show him.
A very good example, when I was in San Diego at the February BPC I spoke at length with Mike Watson, Ben Curry and Dennis Martin about virtualizing our SQL backend. I think we can all guess at their response……..DON’T DO IT! When I brought that up upon my return I was told “not to worry about it”.
Another good example……I fight with my Operations group almost daily about server resources. It’s all virtualized and they think that we can get by with 4GB of RAM on the SQL box and a whopping 2 GB of RAM on my WFE(that’s right that is a single WFE). When I asked for a seperate index server you would have thought I had asked for a $20k a year raise.
I am sure that there are lots of others in similar if not the same situation. It’s not that the application sucks, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s that trying to implement a solution leveraging the parts of SharePoint that would benefit your organization without the proper support and training it’s going to SEEM like it sucks.
Just my .02. Next on the soapbox?
Check out “Danger! Do not implement SharePoint in your Organization!”
http://www.legalitprofessionals.com/index.php/col/columns-fred/783-danger-do
Ok, it’s my turn.
I’ve attended a few SharePoint courses and everyone has told me the same thing about upgrading from WSS 3.0 to MOSS. We ‘tested’ WSS 3.0 for one year and got approval to upgrade to MOSS. While attending one of the many SharePoint courses I asked the same question, “How hard or what is the best way to upgrade?” All the answers from the instructors were the same, “How much data and sites do you have? We only are using up 50GB and have 84 sites.” The common answer to my question was, “Just delete what you have and do a ‘Clean’ install and it will work great.”
We created a Virtual sandbox with WSS 3.0 and upgraded to MOSS and what a headache! We had so many problems that we stayed with WSS 3.0 until we can get support from Microsoft. Oddly even the Microsoft support person said the same thing as all the instructors, “It is easier doing a ‘Clean’ install and start over.” Surely there has to be other companies or some place that has documentation on how to upgrade.
I searched the blogs, Microsoft TechNet forums and many other sites. Funny thing, I could not find any ‘good’ step-by-step instructions or information. When we got our help from Microsoft it took a week of late nights and a lot of troubleshooting to finally get the upgrade to work. We upgraded two months ago and still having problems (i.e. search and backup). The searches stopped working 3 to 4 times and the backups are not done as scheduled.
Our current hospital staff is approximately 4,000 and one SharePoint person, me! I work for a military hospital and have to do it all because, “The Army does more with less.” I am the SharePoint Administrator, Developer, Instructor and anything that has to do with SharePoint. Our sites and databases have grown to 150 sites and 400GB.
Here is an example of who to blame. I was in a class and most of us were active duty military and SharePoint is not military’ Friendly’. The military uses the color calendars in Outlook and would like the same in SharePoint. I know this is something simple but it has a big impact for the military with having to buy from another vendor. So who do we blame?
“Is SharePoint perfect? No, because we should be able to install software from a ‘Big’ company without having so much trouble! I don’t blame the software; the blame is with the developers and other decision makers from Microsoft. They should go out and ask the users what are their needs, likes and dislikes (we know that will never happen). The military is slowly moving to SharePoint but a ‘slow’ rate because of the problems. I would like to spend some time with a SharePoint representative and ask the same questions.
Now some new can get on the ‘Soap Box’.