Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats [LWN.net]

Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats

Posted Nov 13, 2007 18:55 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
Parent article: Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats

Functionality of Sharepoint?  Does it have any?  We are forced to use Sharepoint here at work
and it SUCKS!  Maybe it is just the cluelessness of our IT, but other than saving old
revisions of files, I see no advantage to it over a shared directory structure on a file
server.

to post comments

Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats

Posted Nov 14, 2007 0:02 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Well Microsoft never got anywere by making their software better then everybody else's.  From
early versions of DOS, to Apple, to OS/2, to Novell, everything they made was done better by
other people.

They got 95+% of the PC market, business and personal, by making their products more
attractive, cheaper, and more profitable then other people's. Good advertising, correct
feature targetting, effective FUD, agressive salesmenship, manipulating other businesses,
giving big kick-backs to ISVs for convincing their customers to move to Microsoft, etc etc
etc. They are/were better businessmen.


In this case most businesses already massively use and depend on Windows, MS Office, Exchange,
Microsoft Server, Active Directory, and other Windows-only proprietary software. Sharepoint
integrates with all of that cheaply. It's a no-brainer to try it out and gradually use it more
and more as it matures. 

Linux and open source software, on the other hand, while being much more technically superior
(especially in the web arena) require much higher amounts of investment in employees (which
are treated as a liability, not a asset, in the financial books) and changes to their
infrastructure to use.

Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats

Posted Nov 14, 2007 5:20 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

The problem is when a vertical application depends on Sharepoint instead of some other kind of
back end storage.  Makes it harder for whoever built the application to do a version for
Linux.

Don't be complacent about SharePoint

Posted Nov 14, 2007 7:27 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I use MediaWiki and Sharepoint at work currently, and have done a lot with TWiki in the past,
including developing features and fixes. I don't really like Sharepoint and find it clunky to
use compared to TWiki or MediaWiki - but it's very dangerous to write it off. Sharepoint has
a long list of features, exceeding TWiki's in some cases (e.g. granular access control and
in-place Office document editing). Microsoft is investing a lot in Sharepoint including
adding wiki features, so it's quite likely it will be more competitive with TWiki soon.

In many companies, Sharepoint is being mandated by IT (even one major bank where TWiki was
pioneered), so the competing Wikis have to be a LOT better simply to survive against this
mandate. Currently they are better in some areas, and weaker in others.

See https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/DESgroup/TWikiVShare... for a good comparison by
CERN, http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/SharePointVsTWiki for the TWiki.org discussion, and
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186678&cid=15404016 for another brief comparison. There
are many other Wikis of course but TWiki is the one that's closest to matching Sharepoint -
MediaWiki is also nice, and very fast, but isn't really oriented to the enterprise in the way
it does access control, attachments, etc.

If you want to help FOSS compete with Sharepoint, which is important to FOSS competing on the
desktop with Microsoft as has been discussed, I would suggest you install TWiki. Try using
it, and maybe contribute some documentation updates, and if possible bug fixes and plugins.
TWiki has 200+ plugins but could really do with some that match Sharepoint features.

Getting the (Share)Point About Document Formats

Posted Nov 18, 2007 18:41 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

[...] other than saving old revisions of files, I see no advantage to it over a shared directory structure on a file server.

For saving old revisions of files, my first option would be a shared directory over HTTP on Subversion. Works great and it is completely transparent to your users. Every time you save your document you get your new revision. And it is free.

Still, people keep making their IT choices by looking at the list of features provided by the vendor. Classic mistake from the nineties, people!