Background:
- At work we use MS Office, because who doesn’t. We used to have a central file server with lots of well sorted directories.
- Then Corporate decided to ditch that, everything must move into OneDrive so there’s always a Data Owner.
- The local boss had to move everything from the network share into his own OneDrive, and then share, with each of us, the folders that were relevant to each of us.
- This sounds like distributed storage, which is probably smart in some way.
In reality, it’s shit. Everything is now a link to “corporateName.sharepoint.com” in the browser, and it’s a hassle to find that in the file explorer. SOmeone just shared a folder with me. I see it in my browser. How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view? Should I forget about on-disk storage; is everything today just a browser bookmark?
Worse, I have no idea what’s where. Some people share some stuff and somehow it ends up in my OneDrive, but what’s the context of it?
This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not “getting” it??
SharePoint concept and implementation is awful though. Better have different tools for the different tasks and track different types of artifacts and documents, than using SharePoint. And everything else in normal file system.
SharePoint is the typical mammoth that does everything and it does each thing extremely badly. But it’s Microsoft, so all companies must use it
Sharepoint is actually very well made. It has great versatility and extensibility. The issue that you and others run into that leads to the assumption that sharepoint is bad, is that it was deployed by inexperienced or potentially incompetent people. Most of the time it’s just inexperienced people that aren’t given the time to properly train for a deployment and are told to basically wing it because “there’s no money to train you how to do it right” or other bs cheapskate business excuse.
In my company they paid a lot of money for it, like too much. Simply very few people like it. Mainly paper work people with zero technical skills (those who prints documents to sign, stamp, and rescan them).
Because they paid so much for it, they always try to convince people to use it… Currently we are using it as a glorified s3 bucket for PowerPoint presentations to link them on confluence… But there is always someone who tries from time to time to push it, before it miserably fails again.
That’s my experience. I am sure someone finds it very useful.
See in the case of those people their workflow wasn’t taken into consideration before adoption. It’s definitely not a fit for everyone. But that amount of paper waste is insane. If the docs are already digital, then the signatures and stamps should be digital as well. If the docs are all hardcopies, then sharepoint shouldn’t have been used except as an upload point.
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You don’t need to reimplement SharePoint, just to use different processes and tools.
That said, if you are happy, that’s absolutely fine. I luckily don’t use it. It’s there, someone try to put there some document because “we paid millions for it” (I don’t know if they really did…), after a few frustrating loop of the crappy check in/check out broken system most people give up. I don’t even need to complain. It’s sufficient to wait a couple of weeks and someone else will, no one will find any benefit, and at the end it will be completely dropped again. Until someone remember how much we paid for it, and will try again.
I call it “the cycle of corporate hype”
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I don’t care of the cost, people who push it do. They waste money in a million of way in consultants and tools and servers and concepts and process architecture and PI and stuff I have no idea. I am sure some mckinsey, KPMG, accenture, Gartner, ibm consultant knows why everything useless is so expensive. I usually don’t care. 9/10 of the money spent by my company is wasted, but somehow they manages to do profit. As every corporations. Which is fine. We have been doing cost cutting for few years now, still the amount of money wasted is crazy
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