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”.
13 responses so far ↓
1 Peter Benton // Oct 2, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Please contact me via e-mail. We are a small company located in Mn. We work with small businesses who all are on ths MS Small bus server platform, which includes sharepoint. Alot of our customers want it and I need to learn it, Where do I start? I have attended several seminars but they only apply to high-end enterprise solutions.
Thanks Peter
2 Mosslady // Oct 6, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Peter
I think you are going to find this a lot with SharePoint. Lots of people have it, lots of people use it, but all you really get for information is either Microsoft sales talk or developers writing custom code for it.
I’m a SharePoint user like you. It’s probably best to ask questions and maybe I can answer some things for you, based on my own experience. SharePoint is a big product, and it’s hard to say definitively “what it does” because everyone’s experience is different.
One of the biggest problems I had when I started was that I didn’t even know what SharePoint was. We made some major mistakes first time around because I (and all of us at work) had no idea. It’s more than just a fancy file system with added features, but seriously, that’s all we used it for to start with. And for our intranet.
Ask me any question, no matter how trivial it seems, and I’ll try to answer it. If I just try and explain it though, I’ll end up sounding like Microsoft. [A sales pitch for what isn’t a bad system really, but not giving you any real information.]
That goes for anyone. Ask questions. I have been there, absolute beginner, and felt that I was drowning in technical and sales talk that told me absolutely nothing. There is no such thing as a dumb question.
Another site, if you haven’t already come across it, is http://www.endusersharepoint.com, one of the few sites dedicated to end users of SharePoint, rather than developers, although it does presume you know a little about the product.
Regards
3 Carol Woolman // Dec 11, 2008 at 10:11 am
Someone told me they thought SharePoint could do what I needed. Can you tell me honestly if SharePoint does these things and if so, does it do it “Out of the Box” or will I have to customize?
The three things I need to do are:
1) Gather information (from the field, Marketing Divsions and resellers into some sort of database)
2) Share information (share certain pieces of collected information with others to approve, and collect additional information)
3) Workflow (come up with a workflow that triggers the correct set of sequenced events/tasks)
I need people to be working in the same spreadsheet or database at the same time.
Thanks,
4 Mosslady // Dec 12, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Carol
Yes, SharePoint can do this. In fact, it’s designed for things like this.
You need to remember however, that out-of-the-box doesn’t mean you just install it and it’s ready to go. There is still quite a bit of work to do, to set up your lists and your workflows. It’s a fairly steep learning curve. It’s going to take time to put together.
You also need to change your thinking about how you do things. Start with the SharePoint lists rather than the spreadsheets for example. And don’t expect things to work exactly as they do with Excel.
I am assuming here that your marketing database isn’t so huge (e.g. tens of thousands of records) that it needs its own dedicated system.
Regards
5 Peter Thomas // Dec 30, 2008 at 12:30 am
I am the IT Director for a large Mental Health Hospital in London, England. I need to understand more about what SharePpoint can do for us. The main thngs we need to do are:
1)Publish reports containing data from our SQL Server 2005 Data Warehouse of clinical and management information on our Intranet and Extranet.
2) Develop a new Intranet. Will SharePoint act as a Content Management system/Development tool for this or are there better products out there e.g. DreamWeaver, RedDot etc?
6 Mosslady // Dec 30, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Peter
Addressing point 1 first: Getting data from other databases.
If you want to get data from another (non-SharePoint) database, you need to be sure to get the right version of SharePoint. You need MOSS 2007 Enterprise edition, because this functionality is the Business Data Catalog.
Do a search on MOSS and Business Data Catalog to find out more. Some places to start looking may be:
These articles can be confusing and they assume you know SharePoint. Persevere, and dig around to find better information.
Don’t expect it to be simple though. Unless you’re doing very basic linking you are going to need someone with database and xml skills to set it up for you.
Point 2: Using SharePoint as an intranet or use another content management system (CMS) or web editor
We use SharePoint as an intranet at work and I have to say that I would never want to go back to static web pages (a la Dreamweaver) again. I’m not even sure we could go back, because our intranet has evolved so much.
The change has taken some of the load off the intranet administrators and put it back onto the user. The users do most of the work—uploading documents, changing text and so on. As the intranet admistrator I no longer care when a process document changes, because the people in charge of that particular process document are responsible for it. I no longer care when our OH&S wardens change, because the people in charge of OH&S look after that.
But it does make for more work keeping the intranet manageable (because you have less control) and consistent (everyone likes to do their own thing).
There’s also a lot more training. It’s easy enough to learn how to upload a document but to really use SharePoint properly you have to show people more than that.
A lot of our file management has moved over from LAN directories onto SharePoint too. It has become our central repository for document information, rather than just an intranet.
I haven’t used content management systems like RedDot, although I do know it has capability to work with SharePoint. The last non-SharePoint content management system I worked with (a few years ago now) created static web pages. I ended up ditching it as soon as the contract ran out and reverting back to DreamWeaver because the CMS complicated things unnecessarily. (But remember, too, that I am quite technical, and am very comfortable digging about in the code, which many people who use CMSs are not.)
If I had the choice, would I choose SharePoint over, say, Dreamweaver or another content management system (i.e. a non-SharePoint CMS)? Most definitely, unless the web site was tiny. (SharePoint is not a cheap product, particularly when you take associated costs e.g. database and servers into account). But there is a steep learning curve. Very, very steep. And to get the best out of it, you might need extras like development, or at least someone who’s good with XML (and a few other things).
I say now that I would definitely use SharePoint every time. But if you had asked me the same question three years ago, when I was totally confused about the product and really didn’t know what I was doing I would probably have said the opposite.
7 Conrad // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:23 am
Hi,
i would like to know if it is possible to stream live videos from web cams so that multiple people in the company can have video chats with each othe ron the sharepoint site
thank you,
8 Mosslady // Feb 10, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Conrad
I must say I don’t know much about live video streaming, so I am sorry that I can’t answer this one at all. I can’t even think of anyone who might be able to answer this for you.
My gut feel is that I don’t think SharePoint would do this well. We’re talking huge files and large amounts of continuous data here.
If anyone else has tried this, please let us know.
9 Conrad // Feb 10, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Mosslady thank your for taking the time to read my qeustion. I f it is not possible in that way can you help me find any other alternatives. I need to make a conference video chat system en try to incoparate it into sharepoint. I know with C# it is possible to get e live stream from a web cam i just need to know how i can make this into a webpart and put in on the sharepoint site.
Thanks you for your time..any tips or help is welcome
Conrad
10 Mosslady // Feb 11, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Conrad
I can only say what I would do in your situation.
First, I would check the sites that talked about live streaming and web cams and see if any of them have done it on SharePoint.
If I was going to write my own code for the web part I would start at Microsoft’s MSDN site (maybe start around http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb931737.aspx) and some of the C# developer’s forums.
I would also maybe ask a very general question over over at http://www.endusersharepoint.com/ — do they know of anyone who has done it?
Regards
11 Art C. // May 16, 2009 at 2:53 am
The truth is that SharePoint does nothing useful. It is Microsoft’s attempt to create even more platform lock-in, which no one is really asking for. It’s an intranet portal program (and not a very good one, at that).
Nearly every organization considering SharePoint would be better served by mainstream intranet tools such as wikis and blogs.
12 Mosslady // May 18, 2009 at 7:40 am
I have to say I would disagree that SharePoint does nothing useful. As an intranet portal tool I love it, and would hate to go back to a static site.
And as for wikis and blogs — each has their place, yes, and sometimes that place is inside SharePoint, by the way — the problem starts with the scalability of it all. One tool (wiki for example) is okay when only one group is using it, but when you start to get multiple groups who insist on using multiple tools, then they become a nightmare to manage.
13 Art C. // May 18, 2009 at 9:16 am
Mosslady is completely wrong. SharePoint, without question, does nothing useful. The “multiple groups who insist on using multiple tools” is a strawman argument. Agreeing on a single toolset does not mean you have to use Microsoft’s toolset. In fact, “make the job fit the tool” is how many organizations got stuck with abominations like Exchange in the first place. Do you really want to make that mistake *again* ??
Around here our mantra is “always choose an open tool; if one is not available, at least choose a non-Microsoft tool.” Microsoft builds software designed to lock you into its world. Solving your problems is secondary.
Leave a Comment