When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,
Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.
Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good luck finding anything. Sheesh.
And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.
Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots, and we never lost anything. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used anymore and got recycled. Wow.
Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid, slow and unreliable in practice.
I have seen SharePoint installations at big corporations and they are horrible.
In one case there was a central SharePoint group that has commissioned the sites. So we had a highly restricted, utterly gutted and badly corporate styled thing that was practically useless.
Add to that that there was a weird mix of public and enterprise editions (which cost a bunch of money and were frowned upon by the org unit).
In this environment you can sit back and watch productivity and common sense being choked to death. Enterprise is a weird place.
Not sure what version of SharePoint you were using, but recent versions most definitely obey access rules - if you don't have access to a document, you don't see it in the search results.
No share point does not store history. Get a file above a certain size, and that magically just stops working.
Every time I've seen share point used, everyone described it the same way. Its where documents go to die.
So far at the current gig a share point "upgrade" has meant that all our fun use of the old install is useless. All of the sudden wikis look more useful.
Burn me once and all that. Oh and search, yeah that search is about as useful as altavista was back in the day.
Sharepoint has every possible feature, in the sense it exists on a product information sheet. But every possible feature is implemented in such a terrible way that actually using it is more trouble than just about any alternative, including the "rename file to include version number and then email it around" method.
I think he's referring to when they made sure that "plays for sure" drm license/authentication/whatever servers got shut down so all the music you bought became a bunch of bits in a bucket.
Yes, the shutdown is what I was referring to, as you correctly inferred. Technically it may have all worked but when they pulled the plug on the servers, the value of any previous marketing assurances became clear.
Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.
If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it. Would you allow a dev to just start using Git with no training at your company? Would you cut the dev any slack if he complained about Git without bothering to learn how to use it first?
> If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it.
By all means. How do they know when they're done learning it? It's by definition difficult to tell the difference between missing functionality and hard-to-discover functionality.
Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.