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Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. A lot of CIOs repeate that mantra. You may ask why. They may answer ‘because it all integrates so well!’

As I plow through SharePoint, I’m sharing in that wonderment. Mainly wondering why it really doesn’t integrate well at all. In fact, I’m not so sure MS software teams really are aware of any other software team within the belly of that beast.

Here’s a fun example:

SharePoint issue #27 for the day has me stumped. I’m probably annoying everyone on the Yahoo group with my questions so I’ll jump over the Microsoft Newsgroups. Oh, that’s right–it’s rare that you’ll get an answer in there. OK, I’ll go to sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/.

What is Sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/? It’s a community site that ACTUALLY BUILT using MOSS 2007. Cool. And they have forums! Great. I’ll post.

Oh, I need to enter my Live/Passport/Hotmail/whatever MS calls it now login. OK. Done.

Ah, I need to make a different username just for these forums? Fine. Separate email address? Ah…it says here I should use a fake one because it’ll show up on the forums and I wouldn’t want spam. Uh…that makes a lot of sense to force people to enter fake email addresses rather than just not exposing them, but fine, whatever…

Now what? Oh! Cool, I can choose to get alerts for this forum. I think that’s useful. OK, let’s sign up for alerts.

Done! ERROR: The message you want to be alerted about no longer exists or was deleted. What? I’ve been censored already? Wait a minute…how’d I end up at forums.microsoft.com!?!?

Smooth, Microsoft. Real smooth…