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Work in just about any big office and you have almost certainly been subjected to a semi-built corporate Sharepoint site your boss or the HR department hopes you will use rather than circulating important documents via email. And if you are like most tech-savvy folks, you have found it bafflingly difficult to use.
Microsoft hopes to correct that well-deserved reputation, and is launching a preview of Sharepoint Server 2016 to raise expectations about the new product.
Microsoft says its[sic] made “deep investment in HTML5” to give you “capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on.” And your users get a consistent experience whatever device they choose to wield, including on touch-enabled devices.
A new “cloud hybrid search” will permit users wielding “SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365 to retrieve unified search results through a combined search index in Office 365. The index for that search resides in Office 365, one of many features billed as letting you take advantage of hybrid cloud. The idea is that your on-premises SharePoint can pop the index, or other data, into Microsoft's cloud so you get the on-prem[ises] performance you want without having to bulk out your servers. But of course you do get into PAYG territory with the cloud.
That certainly qualifies as what the Register calls "Buzzword Compliant" but maybe there's true improvement there, too. Search for the expression "Sharepoint sucks" today and you'll get 209,000 hits including this one. Stick around and see if next year Microsoft turns the corner and makes Sharepoint something people find useful and effective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:34PM
Weird that a lot of other software is even worse then.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by termigator on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:23PM
Not worse than Sharepoint.
Sharepoint is a good example of the Microsoft tactic of releaseing a product that claims to provide capabilities of existing products, but it does very poorly or not at all. They do this so folks will not use/buy a different company's product, with MS knowing clueless managers would choose Microsoft regardless of technical merit ("No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft").
When I first encountered Sharepoint at a major tech company many years ago, it was atrocious. Simple things took many clicks to perform, the interface was not intuitive; basically it was trying to do a lot of stuff, but very poorly. I was glad to get away from it.
Years later I had to deal with Sharepoint again. I thought maybe MS finally improved things over several years, especially when alternate software has shown how to do things better. Well, nope! It is still crap, slightly better, but still crap, with MS still relying on clueless managers to make technical decisions. I had to fight to make sure IT did not dump our bug tracking system for Sharepoint. They actually had a person port bug items into Sharepoint as a proof-of-concept that Sharepoint was sufficient and there was no need for dedicated bug tracking system. Fortunately I won that battle.