I cannot understand why many organisations have or are going down the road of Sharepoint implementation. My experience is in construction project management and have gone through Sharepoint implementation in two companies in the last five years. On both occasions it was sold to us as a document management system – it is a document repository, as simple as that. If you want it to be a management tool you have to get bolt ons or pay through the nose for consultants to adapt it. Instead you can simply buy Acconex, project Centre etc etc and straight out of the box you are managing your document flow, drawing storage, capturing project correspondence and all the other data you need to run projects.
When will IT people understand what we do instead of forcing us to change best practice to suit what they think we need ie collaborative software tools. Managing projects does have some collaboration between the various participants but that is outweighed by the need to have accurate real-time records and systems that are easy to learn, use and manage.I came across a great blog and I have reproduced part of it.
http://nkilkenny.wordpress.com/2006/11/13/whats-wrong-with-sharepoint/
“I tend to agree that Sharepoint sucks. Using it is like closing your eyes, holding your breath and spinning around for thirty seconds. When your done you don’t know where you are, you are very dizzy, and feel like you might throw up… I might create something in one place, but can’t delete it or rename it there. After 15 minutes of searching, I can’t find the same tool I used yesterday to do one thing or another. It’s like that house in 13 Ghosts, everything SEEMS to move around on you… What really bothers me is this is not version one. It is a great idea gone horribly implemented.
STAY AWAY… Sharepoint can be an incredibly useful tool, but in any office where I’ve seen it deployed, it’s acting merely as a web-based front-end to the file-system. If that’s all you’re going to be using it for, you might as well just use the file-system, via Explorer and mapped drives, and do away with the glorified front end.
I absolutely hate sharepoint even though it seems to be serving purpose here of a company with over 9,000 employees. i have to do the support and administrative stuff for it and have several users I can’t get connected to our Portal for some reason we can’t figure out.
Sharepoint…I hate Sharepoint with the passion of 10,000 burning Lotus Notes users…Sharepoint is a decent enough idea but it lacks a logical flow for navigation. Also, sometimes it just seems more cumbersome than it’s worth but eh, it works too.
Honestly, I found Sharepoint so inadequate and typical of a first generation MS product that I could only shake my head at it. If it was made by anyone else than MS and had to compete on its merits I suspect most of us would have never even heard of it”
So any business that has an IT department as a support service is exposed to having software imposed on it by people who often do not even understand what that business does.
If you find yourself in that position, you can push back and if that fails simply move on
PREMDALE CONSULTING 