Being one of the few people flying around like a maniac teaching SharePoint classes on a Mac, I'm obviously not a Windows fanboy or Microsoft shill. If you ask them, SharePoint is the best of everything and can do anything.
While that may be true to a certain extent (anything that is as openly customizable as it is can be configured and added on to to do most everything that a computer can), there is a point where you may as well have written your entire solution from scratch.
And well, the things that it offers are not best of breed. I can't name a single feature of SharePoint that is not better had somewhere else. Why would I suggest that anyone use the product, ever?
Note that I said "single feature." SharePoint is much more than a single feature. There might be a better document management system, but not one that also gives you a portal, collaboration on random things, and a central place to base a company intranet from.
With SharePoint, you can build something pretty close to MySpace in a couple days. Its not identical, and some stuff is definitely missing, but you can get really close. That is precisely where SharePoint offers value.
For the majority of things in business, 90% of the way there is more than good enough. Sure, you can spend another 6 months customizing everything to make it perfect, but living with a few idiosyncrasies or a nav element in its default position instead of precisely where they designers wanted it gets you being productive immediately.
So, what am I trying to say? SharePoint has value if you're willing to work with its design and modify your ideas to fit in with it - so work on understanding the product. It's a waste if you're going to spend 6 or 7 figures trying to make it work like it should - you'd be better served writing your own solution from scratch.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Application.master and Default.master
These files are indeed extremely important to any SharePoint deployment. From time to time, though, someone gets the bright idea to tinker with them and break the site. How? Well, say someone decides to open up application.master in SharePoint Designer to make some changes for application pages. Whoops - it's dead.
Anyhow, since I have run into this situation more than once at client sites I figure that what is needed is a really easy place to get replacement default versions of each of these files so that you can go back to happily sharing and pointing.
If you need them, here are some download links. Anyone without SharePoint will have no use for these files anyhow, and there's no magic in them at all, but if someone at Microsoft has a problem with me linking to them feel free to let me know.
Happy SharePointing.
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