Is it me, or is SharePoint needlessly complicated and annoying?

Aren't most microsoft business tools needlessly complex?

Honestly, I think that's just microsoft's way of doing business. They will try to enter a market quickly. They will prioritize a checkbox feature over a feature done "right".

So shipping a feature is more important than shipping a feature correctly done. It might be sort of a good evolutionary strategy.

I think of Teams. Microsoft is just trying to own all of that market. It is adding features all over the place. They're hard to use. There are bugs. There is head-scratching usability.

My companies IT department shut off confluence on short notice and told our teams that they had migrated all the content to sharepont and we could use that going forward.

Five years of organized docs easily searchable turned into a pile of office documents and half functioning “pages”.

I used to work with SharePoint professionally (barf), in that we dragged and dropped HTML, JS, and CSS files into a folder that then powered pages on the company's intranet. Luckily we didn't build components using SharePoint's system, but we still had to navigate through the rest of the cruft.

Some of the issues I ran into include (but aren't limited to):

- Files and folders located in counterintuitive locations. Random files that ended up in some locations "just because". After a few years of working that job I knew where certain things were through tribal knowledge.

- Wading through files and documents that were years old. If SharePoint has a system in place that deletes files above a certain age, we didn't have anything like that set up.

- Dealing with a complicated access/security system, that restricted some users from seeing some pages.

- Having to make the intranet pages "work" with IE11. A good chunk of employees preferred using IE11 as their browser of choice so we couldn't not work on compatibility.

- Once, I accidentally moved in-progress HTML and JS files into a prod folder and one of the pages broke in prod. Fortunately it was after hours and I was able to retrieve the original files from GitHub.

- Major performance issues on some of the more data-heavy pages.

- Users not seeing links to docs because they was checked out (like library books), usually by one person with credentials different from everyone else.

That was Job 1 and I'd hoped to never touch SharePoint again. I'm on Job 3 now and I grimaced when I saw that the company used it as its intranet. I'd hate to be on the team responsible for maintenance.

I missed a management meeting once and ended up with the sharepoint support team. Yes, you'll need an admin, a developer, a DBA, MS Premier support, and probably some contractors to set it up and keep it working. It's even worse if you try to use the workflow, forms, and process automation features.

Yeah, it's horrific, and doubly so because they've introduced new ways of doing things over time but a lot of how-to content on the web still tells you to use the old ways.

We moved from XWiki to SharePoint, which theoretically should provide more or less the same functionality, but the mental overhead of SharePoint's weird conceptual model just makes the whole thing impossible.

My job included SharePoint administration and building simple workflows for a few years, I hated it with a passion. It's not just bloated and complicated, the documentation is a cruel joke. Some of their software I actually grew to like - SQL Server first and foremost, but also Visual Studio, and PowerShell - but SharePoint was a Lovecraftian nightmare the last time I had anything to do with it.

And I have to say, I am so glad I am not the only one to see it that way! I feel your pain!

(And yes, I have suspected at times it was a conspiracy to generate lucrative contracts for consultants and trainers.)

My gripe with Sharepoint:

- I don't see hotkey tool tips when I hover over various buttons. When I look up their hotkeys online, they don't work on mac (neither "ctrl" nor "command" keys work in "ctrl + someKey" combinations). I want to be able to indent/unindent, and URL-link text quickly via hotkeys, not click through things.

- Google Drive docs may not be as configurable as Sharepoint sites, but they're much faster for me to work on-- More Hotkeys, Less clicking buttons (including drilling through multiple button dropdown menus-- (Sharepoint URL link button ,lookin at you)).

It was already more than 10 years ago yes. I did a big project in it. Was not impressed. The generated frontend code (inspected on firebug prob?) was completely bloated and had huge amount of code inlined.

Microsoft doing its part in an international conspiracy to create busywork for the middle class. They don't want you getting too much work done, there isn't enough go around.

Sharepoint can be a nice looking, easy to use tool if it's set up properly.

you know where this is going, though. it's usually not set up properly, and it quickly turns into a big confusing mess.

SharePoint admin at current position. Apart from PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and those beasts, I don't find SharePoint too bad to deal with. It's one of those tools that if you use frequently you can navigate through it without too much fuss, but if you're not using it often you will find yourself spending a ridiculous amount of time hunting a specific setting or option that's less-than-obvious to find.

No, you pretty much nailed it. You see, people think of Microsoft as an old company, and I guess by the standards of the Web sector of the greater programming field, it is. But there are older, and MS learned this trick from one of the oldest: IBM.

I spoke to a SharePoint MVP couple of years back who said that the average SharePoint installation has about 100 databases (not tables).

Trying to do anything on that abomination is like wading through treacle. Slow and unintuitive I can't stand it.

Oh gawd, is it still a thing?!

Not just you Poptart