Ask HN: Is it me, or is SharePoint needlessly complicated and annoying?
All I want to do is create simple text pages and add pictures to them, as well as maintaining a document library. But the amount of options, views, cutomization settings, "hidden" display settings is 10xing the amount of work that should be required.
I upload a file and neither myself nor my team can't see it. I see some text saying that files that are checked out by you are not visible to others. What? How do I check it back in if _I_ can't see it? What were they thinking?
One part of me thinks that it is designed this way so that it necessitates hiring a Sharepoint Developer or SharePoint Admin, which would provide for excellent job security...
36 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadSo Dilbertesque. My condolences.
>Company wants a technical information library >Oh we have an Intranet >Oh what do you mean we will need dedicated resources to administrate it?
“Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.”
Enterprise Roach-Motel where Office Documents Go To Die a Slow Death
Five years of organized docs easily searchable turned into a pile of office documents and half functioning “pages”.
Edit: Parent comment above is spot on about their search.
The main downside to Confluence I've seen has been more around making it obvious when something is public vs private facing. I had to lock things down a bit to ensure nothing internal was getting out, and have a specific tag I add when I want something visible to the client.
It's also INCREDIBLY frustrating that if I make a numbered list, then want to have a break with a picture or whatever, when I go back to the list, it starts back at 1. I don't always want to use a bullet point, but having the numbers be off makes things very hard to understand at a glance, and basically forces me to set things up in a way that shoves all screenshots or graphics at the very end. I absolutely hate it. It's such a stupid little thing. Just let me put in #.(space) and pick up where I left off!!
We moved from XWiki to SharePoint, which theoretically should provide more or less the same functionality, but the mental overhead of SharePoint's weird conceptual model just makes the whole thing impossible.
- I don't see hotkey tool tips when I hover over various buttons. When I look up their hotkeys online, they don't work on mac (neither "ctrl" nor "command" keys work in "ctrl + someKey" combinations). I want to be able to indent/unindent, and URL-link text quickly via hotkeys, not click through things.
- Google Drive docs may not be as configurable as Sharepoint sites, but they're much faster for me to work on-- More Hotkeys, Less clicking buttons (including drilling through multiple button dropdown menus-- (Sharepoint URL link button ,lookin at you)).
you know where this is going, though. it's usually not set up properly, and it quickly turns into a big confusing mess.
Some of the issues I ran into include (but aren't limited to):
- Files and folders located in counterintuitive locations. Random files that ended up in some locations "just because". After a few years of working that job I knew where certain things were through tribal knowledge.
- Wading through files and documents that were years old. If SharePoint has a system in place that deletes files above a certain age, we didn't have anything like that set up.
- Dealing with a complicated access/security system, that restricted some users from seeing some pages.
- Having to make the intranet pages "work" with IE11. A good chunk of employees preferred using IE11 as their browser of choice so we couldn't not work on compatibility.
- Once, I accidentally moved in-progress HTML and JS files into a prod folder and one of the pages broke in prod. Fortunately it was after hours and I was able to retrieve the original files from GitHub.
- Major performance issues on some of the more data-heavy pages.
- Users not seeing links to docs because they was checked out (like library books), usually by one person with credentials different from everyone else.
That was Job 1 and I'd hoped to never touch SharePoint again. I'm on Job 3 now and I grimaced when I saw that the company used it as its intranet. I'd hate to be on the team responsible for maintenance.
Sadly it's Microsoft Teams' backbone, so it's used far and wide still.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/sh...
At one point, maybe still today even, MS was pitching SP as a great environment to build and run custom apps inside of.
I put a lot of time and energy into trying to leverage SP in this way -- the result was extreme disillusion. Underneath the covers, believe me you do not want to "see how the sausage is made."
Around the same time one of the Sharepoint evangelists (or similar) wrote an article explaining that Sharepoint components/features (WIKI for example) were "never intended to be best-in-class or even close to it"
I mean, WTH that kind of statement should not instill confidence in anyone.
Honestly, I think that's just microsoft's way of doing business. They will try to enter a market quickly. They will prioritize a checkbox feature over a feature done "right".
So shipping a feature is more important than shipping a feature correctly done. It might be sort of a good evolutionary strategy.
I think of Teams. Microsoft is just trying to own all of that market. It is adding features all over the place. They're hard to use. There are bugs. There is head-scratching usability.
And I have to say, I am so glad I am not the only one to see it that way! I feel your pain!
(And yes, I have suspected at times it was a conspiracy to generate lucrative contracts for consultants and trainers.)