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.