[thelist] sharepoint?

Ken Schaefer ken.schaefer at gmail.com
Tue Aug 10 19:31:50 CDT 2004


Hi all,

Addressing a couple of points in one message:

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 07:34:26 -0700, Zug, Bryan
<bryan.zug at seattlechildrens.org> wrote:
> Also -- it is _not_ a good place to store web scripts -- particularly .asp
> and asp.net files since sharepoint basically runs on and asp.net server.

Definately - it's a collaboration or portal tool, not a CVS. Microsoft
makes Visual Source Safe (VSS) if you want a developer CVS. VSS v6 is
getting long in the tooth, and is not without it's issues, and from
what I understand is being replaced with two products next year. VSS
2005 will be a substantial rewrite of VSS 6, and will fix a lot of
issues. For more robust team CVS functionality, Visual Studio Team
System Foundation will be available [1] [2]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 07:31:54 -0700, Zug, Bryan
<bryan.zug at seattlechildrens.org> wrote:
> >>
> so what is it about adding content that make's it a nightmare?
> >>
> 
> We use sharepoint 2.0 and it works fine for most Office 
> 2003 documents but when it comes to MS Project 
> documents I will often get a "you can't check
> this file out to edit it" message. 
> Buggy enough to use if you understand how to work around it -- but, these
> systems are intended to make it easy to share and manage documents for
> non-technical users -- edit cycles like the above (with little or no
> explanation) make it quite frustrating.

I did a quick search for this issue, and can't find any references to
it. I don't want to discount the possibility that this is a bug, but
if it is, it's certainly not widespread. I would suggest enlisting the
help of the Sharepoint newsgroups to see if someone can help you out
with this. I suspect something with your implementation is causing an
issue here. Personally, I haven't stored MS Project files in
Sharepoint - instead used Project Server (which, supposedly integrates
with Sharepoint, but was a bit of a devil to get configured properly)

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 06:09:16 -0700, Carolyn Jewel
<carolyn.jewel at legacynet.com> wrote:
> Just to throw in my 2 cents on this, we have sharepoint 
> services at my place of employment and while it looks 
> great, it's horrible to use. Personally, I hate it. Every 
> time I try to add content to the portal,
> it's a nightmare. FWIW.

Without explaining what version of Sharepoint you're using, and what
problems you are having, this doesn't really help much at all. I have
trouble deciphering my girlfriend's cosmetics collection, but that
doesn't mean that cosmetics are a nightmare - it's just that I don't
understand enough about them. In your case, your programmers might not
have developed the necessary backend infrastructure, or just
implemented the whole thing poorly. Sharepoint Portal Server is aimed
at the enterprise market (certainly, larger scale enterprises), and is
not a trivial product to implement.

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 07:31:54 -0700, Zug, Bryan
<bryan.zug at seattlechildrens.org> wrote:
> Also -- it works pretty well with Office 2000 documents, but the check-in
> and check-out roundtrip process is different enough from office 2003 (at
> least in our implementation) that if you have a mixed environment, you are
> going to spend a lot of time tutoring users on how to manage their files.

I would definately agree here. *If* you have Office 2003 -and- you are
using the correspondingly new Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS), then
things work nicely. If you are using old Office clients (or conversely
using old Sharepoint with new Office), then things don't work very
nicely at all, and you'll need to do a fair bit of user training to
get it all working, perhaps making the document workspaces more of a
hassle than it's worth.

That said, if you have good .NET developers, and you use a lot of
Microsoft backend technology (or even stuff from any of the major
players like Lotus, or Oracle), you can certainly use Sharepoint to do
other things, like develop a portal or similar with far less effort
than if you had to develop it all from scratch.

Cheers
Ken

[1] Visual Source Safe Road Map
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvsent/html/vssmap.asp

[2] Visual Team System
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/team/default.aspx


More information about the thelist mailing list