I am going to start this controversial article to my blog. The purpose of this article is to provide some reflections on the adoption and utilization of SharePoint in the organzation. Patrick Tisseghem mentioned “SharePoint is about build or buy” in his famous blog “SharePoint is not a holy grail“. Well, I quite agree with that as SharePoint is not a solution for everything. It is how you apply it in order to aid you in the solution. However, from my own experience, SharePoint development experience isn’t as friction-free as it could be. Therefore, my formula is simple: Effective sharepoint solution = OOTB SharePoint + third party tools + minimal customization. Yes, if you still think you need heavy customization after leveraging OOTB SharePoint and evaluate the existing off the shelf sharepoint application, then forget about Sharepoint
1. Customizing SharePoint costs money and takes time. I am sure any .NET developers can skill up and be productive and happy working with SharePoint, but it takes time. There is a steep learning curve and new development conceptes to adjust. The current situation is people pay $XXX for SharePoint Developers and they still can’t get decent ones. Oh, don’t forget these PM/business owners who have been nurtured in SharePoint OOTB syndrome, they won’t be happy to see developers spending too much time on learning and training.
2. Poor supportability.To say SharePoint is a development platform, well, it is partially true. It is a development platform for Microsoft and its partners. It should be a product for the ordinary companies who wish to use SharePoint to solve their daily problems. Why? First of all, customized SP is hard to support. You get some funky contractors write some funky custom code and after a couple of months something goes wrong and their successors have to dig into these code to investigate what is going on. Secondly, Microsoft has three year dev cycle for SharePoint. You will expecting your application to upgrade with Microsoft’s new release. But remember, Microsoft doesn’t support custom code. You messed up, bad luck.
3. There are a lot of community supports for SharePoint, but looks like most people is still learning the concepts and exploraing the best practises. Again, a good place to go maybe Codeplex. It has a lot of community tools. It is free and it has version controls as well. At least it will give you some code block to start with for customization. But, like I say, they are community tools, so don’t be too fuzzy.
Looking forward, we are expecting Microsoft and its partners to develop more useful web parts and features just like what they do in MOSS 2007. And organizations only need to subscribe to what they need and configure it according to business requirements.
