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Are you sick of me talking about SharePoint yet? I know I am. ;o)

I’ve been working fighting with SharePoint for several months now. Here’s a somewhat random list of issues I’ve encountered that weren’t completely obvious (even to Microsoft) prior to tackling the rollout of our new intranet. I started this list months ago but realized that this will continue on for ever, so I might as well get the first 15 items out there.

1. For starters, the naming convention of the products is confusing: There is Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This is the free version of SharePoint that comes with Windows Server. Then there Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS). This is the expensive add-on that provides enterprise navigation, enterprise search, Excel services, Content Management Features, etc. Even though marketing shows that there are many editions of MOSS, there is only one actual product that you install. The editions are all just various CAL licenses. Then there is SharePoint Designer. This is desktop software your IT folks need to modify templates and workflow and the like within SharePoint. You can also componentize your purchase and separately get Excel Server or Search Server and the like. Bottom line is that you WILL be spending a chunk of timing just getting your shopping list ready and finding a MS rep to give you the straight answer as to what licensing you need.
2. SharePoint Designer is the ‘new’ FrontPage and is the product you need to modify SharePoint page templates (MasterPages, page templates, pages, etc, etc.). It sucks less than FrontPage, but still sucks. Namely, you can’t do anything remotely WYSIWYG if you have any hopes of using a table-less CSS layout on your site. Then again, you shouldn’t be thinking about table-less CSS layouts using SharePoint.
3. WSS3, out of the box, supports Active Directory Account Creation features. This is great if you want site users to be able to add people’s accounts directly to your AD domain. We are doing this to allow site owners the ability to add non-employee 3rd party business partners to their sites. However, if you you pay the huge amount to ‘upgrade’ to MOSS, you loose this feature. MS claim’s you can built the feature yourself, but it’s easier to fork out a few more bucks and go with Bamboo Solution’s commercial add-on for it.
4. PDF indexing is not available out of the Box. Adobe hasn’t upgraded their tool to enable this in many years. The solution, again, is to purchase a 3rd party product.
5. Just because the product has been out for 10 months, don’t expect there to be a lot of documentation or 3rd party books on the subject. Most MOSS books didn’t hit shelves until 2nd quarter of 2007. There still isn’t a SharePoint Designer book available. Microsoft’s accessibility and planning toolkits have yet to be released. So, you’re going to be flying blind quite a bit. Get used to it.
6. Do not use MOSS to convert an existing web site into a MOSS powered web site. Instead, design a new site based on what MOSS can do. While you’ll hear plenty of claims of ‘you can Make MOSS look like anything’, it’s not really true. Yes, you can bend the presentation quite a bit, but the functionality is what it is. So, don’t waste time trying to make MOSS do something it just wasn’t designed to do. While we web folks hate to design around the limitations of a specific technology, it’s really the only sane way to deal with MOSS. Cameron Moll has talked about this quite a bit.
7. Don’t expect the built-in Wiki to be useful. It sucks.
8. Don’t expect RSS to work. It can work. But only within the confines of a particular site collection. And only if you are using Kerberos authentication OR if you enable anonymous access on all your sites (yea, IT will love that option). Note that MS typically suggests you use NTLM for most installs. Even then, there are many complaints in the newsgroups and forums that it still doesn’t work.
9. ‘~spurl’ syntax in SharePoint Designer is a great thing. It allows you use root-relative links in relation to specific sites and site collections. Learn it. Also note that, as far as I can tell, SP Designer can’t render this in design view (again, are you surprised? ;o)
10. EVERYTHING* in SharePoint is stored in the database. Everything. Page templates, masterpages, CSS files, content, documents, lists, etc. It’s all stored in SQL server. But don’t expect to query the DB on your own. It’s not in any sort of human readable structure. Instead, you need to query SharePoint via web services or using the Business Data Catalog or custom development of web parts or (believe it or not) Microsoft Access.
11. * OK, a few exceptions…namely things like SiteMap XML files and config files. These are on the filesystem. Which is a huge bummer as they are now no longer editable by non-IT folks. And any update to these files requires you replicating them to all of the physical servers on the farm.
12. Ajax.net isn’t supported. *Maybe* in SP1.
13. The inline HTML Text Editing component ONLY works in IE. And is pretty limited. There is a free component, Telerik’s RadEditor Lite that can be installed to support Firefox and Safari. However, that doesn’t work very well either.
14. Microsoft is releasing a free Express Version of Search Server 2008. Your organization might want to put some time into looking into this product before shelling out for MOSS (If one of your primary reasons for MOSS is the search abilities).
15. CSS in MOSS will drive you mad. All CMS content in MOSS is edited in-line. That means the CSS that comes with MOSS has to support both the front-end presentation to the public, as well as all the custom editing elements within the CMS components. You’ll quickly find that in your own CSS that you add you constantly have to put in all sorts of !important attributes. Why? Well, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decide that by default, their own CSS file core.css should ALWAYS be the last CSS file loaded so that it can over-ride your previous efforts. It also made a silly decision to link to any other CSS files in ALPHABETICAL order. Ugh. Cleverworkarounds.com talks about this issue. And don’t even think of making wonderfully semantic, valid CSS-P based layouts. You can try. You can’t win, though. If you are a person that likes valid markup and semantic content and table-free layouts, then walk away from SharePoint as soon as you can, as it will only drive you mad. To stay sane, crank some Pearl Jam, throw on your flannel, and start whipping out table-laden markup like it was 1998 all over again.