Moss Lady

“Out-of-the-box” is the term we use for an uncustomised version of SharePoint, as in ‘using it straight out-of-the-box’.  This is often referred to as OOTB.

Myself, I also sometimes refer to it as ‘vanilla’ SharePoint (plain, with no flavouring). 

Just how useful is SharePoint out-of-the-box?

In a recent blog, Patrick Tisseghem talks about building a relational database SharePoint solution with

 … no-trivial types of business processes support and workflows on top of WSS without major customizations and no development at all.

Did he manage it?  Only partially.  He says:

Am I convinced that SharePoint delivers the out-of-the-box experience to support all of your business needs? Nope! Did we manage? Not really. We got about 60% of what the business wanted.
Patrick Tissegham, Do we store relational data in SharePoint

I would say this applies pretty much to anything in SharePoint.  You can do around 60% out-of-the-box, but for that other 40%, you really need to customise.

Does this mean you can’t use SharePoint if you can’t customise? 

Not at all.  But it does make it harder, because that 40% adds the wow factor, the meat that helps your users adopt it more readily.

60% of SharePoint still makes it an impressive product, by the way, but it’s often an uphill struggle to convince users why they should do things the SharePoint way and not another way.  It’s the customisation that tips the scales into true acceptance.

I recently installed MOSS 2007.  As a user of SharePoint 2003, here are some of my first impressions.

First impression.  Yes, this is a SharePoint site all right. 

• Microsoft would probably be insulted by my calling their look and feel for the two products similar—I am sure they spent a lot of effort improving 2007—but that’s what it looks like at first glance. 
• A little sprucing up of the styles, some cleaner design, but overall it still looks like a SharePoint site.

Second impression. Is this a portal site or a WSS site?

• Look a little longer and it’s not so simple.  In fact, it’s quite confusing.
• If it wasn’t for My Site and a couple of other portal-type things I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a MOSS site or a WSS site.

Third impression. I am so confused.

• How on earth does one do anything here?

Fairly standard reactions for a major upgrade, I would say. The product looks good, although at first glance the changes imply a steeper learning curve than I was hoping.

I must say that by the time I really understood SharePoint, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS), we had heavily customised our site, so I can’t really compare out-of-the-box SPS 2003 with out-of-the-box MOSS 2007.  Even so, my overall impression is that in MOSS 2007 the WSS roots show through far more that they did in SPS 2003.

Two questions people often ask when first confronted with SharePoint are, “What is it?” and ”What does it do?”

If you read the blurb about SharePoint on the Microsoft site it’s full of marketing-speak and talks about the

“Integrated suite of server capabilities for enterprise search, content management, business process facilitation, simplified information sharing, and enhanced business insight”
SharePoint home page on Microsoft site

which really tells you nothing at all about what SharePoint is or does.

If you persevere and learn a bit more, your next question is likely to be, “What does it do that I can’t do now?”

Strangely enough, it’s the wrong question.  What you really need to ask is, “How can SharePoint help me to do my work better, or more easily?”.  But let’s answer the other question.

What can I do with SharePoint that I can’t do now?

The answer is … not much.

You can, however, do things differently—and that difference can save you a lot of time and work.

Let me explain using a non-SharePoint example.

‘Sandy’ is a friend of mine.  She’s a bookkeeping wiz, and loves the work.  She toyed briefly with the idea of going into business with ‘Richard’, providing bookkeeping services for a small business clients.  The problem was, Richard was an old-fashioned guy who had not had much exposure to computers throughout his working life.  His idea of bookkeeping was the old-fashioned ledger book.

He refused to consider one of the dedicated accounting programs such as QuickBooks or MYOB, although he did agree that maybe they could use a spreadsheet—provided they wrote it into the ledger first, and then transferred that to the spreadsheet.

“No way,” said Sandy.  “That’s far too much work, and double-dipping, besides.”

Richard refused to budge.  The only way he would contemplate recording the data was was via pen and paper.

As you can imagine, their partnership foundered, then and there.   

And that’s how I look at SharePoint. I have talked about this on another site, how I believe that SharePoint’s biggest competitor is its own product siblings in the Microsoft Office suite.  Nowadays not many people want to go back to pen and paper ledger books, but most people find that Excel, Word and Outlook, along with Windows file manager, are more than adequate for them to do their day-to-day work.  They know these products, they have processes in place for working with documents.  Processes that have been tweaked over the years so that they really work well. Why should they change?

First up, you don’t change the tools.  SharePoint is not called the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for nothing.  The Office products are integrated so seamlessly it’s almost impossible to tell where SharePoint starts and Word or Excel or any of the other Office products end.  If you write business reports you are still going to write them in Word. If you create financial spreadsheets you’re still going to create them in Excel.  What does change is how you store and share those documents, and how you report on issues and other things.

But you do have to change your way of thinking to get the best out of SharePoint, and if you don’t change, then you will never understand just how much SharePoint can do for you. 

Remember, it’s not about “What does SharePoint do that I can’t do now?”.  It’s about, “How can SharePoint help me do my work better or more easily”.