Is a long time to go between posts; suffice it to say the completion of our migration and the birth of my latest child have both interfered and distracted to say the least.
So what have I learned now that we are a Sharepoint shop? First and foremost, Sharepoint is not a CMS. Oh, it was sold as one I grant you, but it is most definitely not a CMS. A CMS represents a simple interface for users to add and update content without having to know any programming or HTML. A CMS suggests that one’s content is templated, sliced, diced, and ready to roll without a lot of mucking under the hood. Sharepoint is, unfortunately, not that simple.
What Sharepoint is in many ways is a frustrating experience for a site manager, especially one on the business rather than the technical side. Though our tech people seem sometimes as frustrated as we are. There are things that should be simple that aren’t; there are things that require multiple trips through the publishing steps to resolve; there are things that flat out don’t work.
On the flip side of these complaints, Sharepoint is a wonderful document management tool; there are some neat tricks like group by within the document libraries that have proven very valuable. The ability to develop customized lists and reuse those lists elsewhere in the portal has been another great feature that both saves time and helps standardize subsites within the portal. The team sites are great tools for restricted-access group collaboration that meet their stated purpose – provide anytime, anywhere interaction to a limited group of people.
So the takeaway from the migration experience is double-edged; we are undoubtedly a step up from where we were, but the sales job was not as honest as I think it should have been. Don’t get me wrong – I like Sharepoint, and it’s becoming a common (if not necessarily a standard) tool within the industry. I’ve learned an awful lot about the product in the few months we’ve been live, and I think we’re making it work. But caveat emptor as they say – it’s not a CMS, it never was, and it never will be. Know what you’re getting in to before you sign on.
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