If you don't need document management then SharePoint won't do anything for you. It is entirely possible that a wiki would be a better choice. At this point sing you already have it maybe consolidate down to just a few SharePoint sites like: Engineering, HR, Accounting... That way you can use SharePoint for areas where people are unfamiliar with who to talk to. So for example if you don't know who in Accounting handles foreign checks and what the policy is for foreign purchase SharePoint works for you, but inside engineering you use something else.

First off, they emphasize these ridiculous social networking style features. "Connecting to people". As if you don't know who the members of your team are.

Well Yammer is a new feature. People in large companies often don't know the other people in their teams. You may not have worked in large enough organizations where this is a problem.

. If you are such an MS house that you have Sharepoint, then you already use Outlook as your primary written communication tool - no one is going to switch over to Sharepoint for collaboration unless you take away Outlook, or unless MS spends some time actually integrating Outlook with Sharepoint in more than a token way.

Email is a 1-1 or small-small collaboration system. Document management is many-many.

I still don't understand how Excel/Word/Powerpoint losing data when saving to a Sharepoint site is not what you would consider a major problem with the client software, but a configuration problem on the Sharepoint side. A failure to upload should trigger some kind of fallback to local storage.

Because that's not a SharePoint problem it is a SharePoint as you have it configured problem.

IMHO, you need a dedicated librarian on each team if you want to use Sharepoint (or similar metadata based tools).

I don't know about dedicated but yes you need at least one person in each document creation group who sees SharePoint as one of their core job functions. The librarian is more at the level of integrating across the company. It sounds to me in your description like your company might be too small to have the sorts of problems that SharePoint is designed to fix.

And God, the lock-in. It's bad enough that we have these legacy wikis running - now in emulated hardware purgatory. But at least they are running in a VPN somewhere in purgatory, requiring no admin time and not requiring any license fee. Our little failed experiments can wither peacefully and cheaply - only accessed when old data is needed for reference. But this Sharepoint stuff, if they decide to stop paying the fee it is gone. I'm sure you can export it in some manner, but what a mess.

No argument there. SharePoint is a serious lock in. The companies like yours who are using it wrong have much less of a problem than the companies who are using it right. It will cost those companies a fortune to get their data out. Most likely they will be on Share Point forever.

OK, would it be fair to say that Sharepoint sucks in roles that lots of people seem to expect it to be useful for?

Yes that's fair. Though IMHO most companies and individuals don't really use any of their software right. So for example the #1 thing people do with Excel is keep lists. There is far better outlining software than Excel which is much better for lists. But...

I'm hardly an expert, but I kept getting the impression that it was a bad tool intended for general use.

I think most companies (over 100 employees) need a document library. Most companies write a large percentage of their documents in Office. I think Share Point is a reasonable choice for a document library for most companies. That's the general use. Then you throw in project resources like team calendars, team wikis... I think it is rather good and less hassle than most of them. But that's different than saying no hassle.

Taking the example of a file share. What most people do with a file share is better done in SharePoint than NFS. Which is not to say Share Point makes a good no frills file share but the changes that Share Point induces are the right kinds of changes for most companies and will benefit them.

Similarly on things like project calendar sharing.

I wouldn't say SharePoint sucks. It sucks when you don't use it as intended. The GP was using it as a file share. SharePoint is very good as a light document management solution with MS Office integration.

As far as the rest, I said the comparison is to Documentum. Documentum generally recommends an implementation team. It is not uncommon that Documentum has a permanent IT support department (i.e. multiple people). Share Point can get by with less than 1. As for metadata and using it its way. Yes. That's standard for a document management solution.

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Imagine if someone was talking about SQLServer as a replacement for Oracle and we were discussing the lower cost and lower administrative hassle relative to Oracle. And you kept coming back with a comparison to using text files and how much easier and less of a problem text files were. SQL Server did a great job of taking Oracle administration (a skilled profession) and making it something that a moderately skilled admin could do part time on the side. Similarly SharePoint gets you 80% of Documentum for 20% of the cost.

1000 users on Documentum fully configured is probably just under $1m.
1000 uses on Sharepoint fully configured is about $200k

OTOH
1000 users on a fileserver fully configured is going to be $20k.

That's where you need to make the comparison. For smaller business, SharePoint online you can be at $7 / user / mo for a small business. There is nothing remotely like that for the higher end suites. But heck I can get 50g file share in the cloud for free.

You aren't getting it. Sharepoint is a cheap document management library like Documentum: http://www.emc.com/domains/doc... not an expensive fileshare.

As for the Office integration being terrible, that's just not true. Failing silently is not alright but that shouldn't be happening there is something going wrong with your config.

As for metadata... actually the Project Managers, Systems Analysts, Business analysts.... should be doing it not the engineers. Library maintenance is supposed to be part of someone's job. Seriously your company just isn't using the product right.

Are you sure about that? I tried signing into iCloud with the credentials I use for iTunes, and it said "Your Apple ID must be used to set up iCloud on an OS X or iOS device before you can use iCloud.com."

Did I go to the wrong place? Or can I set up an account even if I don't own a machine?

Oh Interesting. http://www.apple.com/icloud/se... . Seems that iCloud no longer supports account creation directly without at least one OSX or iOS device. That's a change.

Try copying a folder with a few thousand files in it to Sharepoint and then perform the same action on a shared network drive.

Sharepoint by default is going to want to structure information. The assumption is that thousands of files are going to be upload by an admin not a general user. Making uploading thousands of files hard is a feature not a bug.

Every once in a while, it simply fails to save the document you are editing silently

There are error messages being passed. If they are being blocked somewhere then diagnose them. Just like any other configuration bug.

I don't find the searches to be any better than the Twiki searches were with the Google appliance. Sure, the admin can require metadata to be filled in, but that is only as useful as the person who filled it in. And it doesn't help at all for older documents where search would be most useful.

Sharepoint isn't magic. Either it is going to build naive indexes like Google or people are going to have to fill in metadata. The metadata is part of what allows for intelligent searches. Also the integration. So for example "Give me all excel documents that link to our sales March forcast" is possible.

Anyway Seraphim_72 is giving you the same answer. Your problem isn't SharePoint but admins that don't know how to admin SharePoint.

@David

I have no idea why Putin felt he needed to cheat when he could have won so easily. But others have done the same thing. Richard Nixon, 1972 being an example that comes to mind.

The integration is really good but it assumes you have a SharePoint administrator setting it up. As far as glacial file transfers that sounds like a SQLServer issue generally. You need to make sure the server is setup to handle the file transfers. As far as wiki vs. SharePoint.... SharePoint works well because it can allow deep linking within office documents to one another in a reliable version controlled way. You can also do really powerful searches.

As for not allowing extensions you need, that's definitely a configuration issue that shouldn't be happening.

Very true.

1) Of course a RAID can be used as a backup. RAID doesn't back itself up itself up but that's a different question.
2) How are tapes any better for linear writing than HDD?
3) Certainly tape drives can go a long time.
4) HDD can be used over and over as well.
5) If the volume of data is small the cost factor goes down which kills the only advantage of tape (other than longevity).

SharePoint is a lot more than a shared network drive. I'd say it is a light version of Documentum. If you or the team is using it as only that then: you aren't using it right, no one setup it up right and/or you weren't properly trained.

Keynote is free now with Macs and iOS devices and free online for everyone. That being said Keynote underwent a pretty substantial downgrade. Apple's goal is 100% compatibility between the iOS, Web and OSX versions so they've had to pull features out and gradually add them back so that they work well on all platforms.

Prior to the downgrade (and you can still use the old version on modern macs) I'd say that:
Powerpoint has somewhat better integration with 3rd party software and some more advanced features
Keynote is far better at creating a good looking presentation for someone who doesn't use Powerpoint regularly.

After the downgrade Keynote is just frankly a much less feature rich product that still looks pretty.

Assume you are right and one dies. Given the huge features overlap, the same file formats and the fact both are open source, what difference is that going to make? The users will just relatively seamless switch over when the time comes.

I think that's fair. OpenOffice as it exists today is a merger back of the Lotus Symphony code. So there was a fork and an unfork.