The SharePoint ‘but…’ list

One of the frustrations with a lot of software these days is that the bullet-point feature list in the brochure doesn’t usually tell the whole truth. It omits the ‘but…’ statements that are often critical to have a full understanding of the capabilities of a particular feature.

MOSS is full of these omitted ‘but…’ statements, so I thought I’d try and start collecting some here. I’ll try and update this list as I find them. This list isn’t meant to be a list of gripes (though I guess it is) but rather just a bunch of things to consider before you put too much effort into  a particular SharePoint feature offering.

  • There are now two-levels of ‘Recycle Bins’ in MOSS, but…
    • …it only saves content deleted from a site *not* a site as a whole. So if a user deletes a site, it’s gone and you need to go to your backup tapes or look into this option from codeplex.
  • SharePoint now has WIKIs, but…
    • …they are not true WIKIs in that there is no support for WIKI syntax nor semantic markup in general. In addition, it’s quite laborious to add images inline with your content.
  • Excel Web Services allows you to build KPIs with visual indicators in MOSS, but…
    • …note that this is pretty much limited to ‘flat’ data. Once you need to start working with relational data and want to make dashboards, you’ll likely want to dive into the MOSS Business Data Catalog and/or consider alternatives such as Microsoft Reporting Services
  • MOSS includes Web Content Management features (CMS), but…
    • …note that these features kind of suck. They’re great if they’re all you got, but if your primary focus is Web Content Management on a large scale, I’d strongly consider a dedicated CMS product. Many, such as SiteCore, are now even offering ’sharepoint connectors’ that will still allow you to leverage SharePOint, but not be burdened with the CMS interface that is has.
  • MOSS/WSS3 is more browser agnostic, but…
    • …it still has a ways to go. WSS2 really needed IE for most things, but now Firefox and the like are viable browsers for use with MOSS/WSS3. Some gotchas: You won’t have any activex based features such as drag and drop folder views and excel web services; the built-in Rich Text Editor will not load (install Telerik’s RadEditor instead); and mamy of the UI menus won’t work as menus and instead will act as buttons that open the menu in separate panes (which will just require some alternate training for non IE users).
  • Using web enabled Infopath forms is a great way to get highly customized data inputed via a friendly UI into MOSS, but…
    • …Infopath forms are still not very scalable. If you want to modify your form after you have data entered, you may loose the connection with your existing data. Plan carefully!