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> Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

With SharePoint I can share documents and directories with other people in my company.

As much as I think SharePoint is "mediocre", Google Doc is just shit when it comes to sharing[1].

[1] The only sharing google doc does well is sending a link to ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT to a bunch of people by EMAIL ONLY.

therealmarv 3468 days ago

With Google Drive I can ALSO share documents and directories with other people in my company. I don't get your point

nu5500 3468 days ago

Yea, that probably wasn't a great example. I think at a basic file storage and sharing perspective the products offer about the same.

However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.

More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.

foota 3468 days ago

What's wrong with their sharing? I don't understand your comment in [1]

gonewest 3468 days ago

Totally agree. With GDrive you can share a folder with a group of collaborators and anyone can modify or add to the files therein.

With a sharepoint, there is a single place where everything is stored, the sharepoint.

Everything there is accessible, visible and searchable (modulo access permissions). It's de-facto shared.

---

With a Google Drive, all contents is private, only visible by you, only accessible by yourself.

Other people can't access your stuff, people can't search your stuff, people can't even know what may or may not exist.

If you want to share something, you have to email a link a single specific document of yours to selected people (who will each individually have to accept the invite).

How do you keep track of what is shared? by who? to who? how do you share stuff to groups/teams/businessunit? Basically, google docs intuitively goes against everything you want to do in an entreprisey context.

timdierks 3467 days ago

You can share folders; also, check out Team Drive. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/google-opens-up-its-new-pr...

user5994461 3467 days ago

It's an early access feature, only available since a few days, if you request it personally to a google sales rep.

Yes. That's one of the thing they miss really bad for sharing. It should have been there for 10 years already.

sowbug 3468 days ago

It's easy to share a folder in Google Drive.

tluyben2 3468 days ago

Everything you say also goes for Drive... Not sure what you mean?

Already__Taken 3468 days ago

There's also some new team drive coming to address this https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/11/google-team-dri...

Case in point. Google Drive should have had a workflow for teams and organisations since 10 years.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-p...

the new client syncs sharepoint document libraries fine. the only reoccuring problem i have right now is with excel files locking (for 10m??) after editing.

I use sharepoint as a windows shared network folder. Don't have to use sync tools.

zeedrive?

the new onedrive client with selective sync is nice if you have something like say a 400mb autocad drawing youd rather not stream everytime you double click it. you can sync just the files in the group/documentlibrary you want.

SharePoint has been crap in the past, I'd agree with that, and Outlook is poor when it comes to HTML standards, but the rest of O365 seems solid to me. Other than SharePoint, what in particular do you see as weaknesses in the O365 lineup?

dleslie 3468 days ago

Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?

hackcrafter 3468 days ago

Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services.

Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)

it says at the bottom if you want to avoid the decision tree to rename your personal account. pick a second username and the problem goes away.

tomc1985 3468 days ago

They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook

douche 3468 days ago

Outlook for Android is better than any of the alternative mail clients I can get on my phone. Although that is not saying much...

OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.

Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.

tomc1985 3468 days ago

I just uninstalled Outlook for Android and my phone went from unusably-laggy to performing just like new. I had a full charge this morning and it is early afternoon and my battery was at 30%. Android's battery usage analyzer blamed 60% of that on Outlook. Opening Outlook and trying to use it meant 30+ seconds waits while I do simple things like "view the first page of my inbox" or "enter an email address into the To:" field.

You're saying that all the other options are worse??

(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)

> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

tomc1985 3468 days ago

Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....

larrywright 3468 days ago

Then you haven't upgraded: https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...

KirinDave 3468 days ago

Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts with things like cough anti-virus providers of ill repute cough and they cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

mjrpes 3468 days ago

I feel your pain. As a tiny business we are still using old and obsolete WSS 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server. We looked into hosted sharepoint last year but the thing is so slow and cumbersome, it drained all happiness from my life. You can smell all the cludgy enterprise features that have been baked it over the years. Not at all fun for a small business that wants something simple that just works. We are dead set to migrate away to another system, something like GlassCube or Asana. The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting.

http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlikview

>"The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting."

Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?

http://www.tableau.com/

http://community.pentaho.com/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

> "Like hell I'm not blaming them."

So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?

>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"

Examples?

douche 3468 days ago

Skype for Business and Skype are two completely different, just barely compatible things. They run completely different networking protocols, and the S4B client is still, barring some cosmetic skinning, the same as the Lync client from nearly four years ago. The About page in the S4B client may still be calling itself the Microsoft Lync Client - it was still doing so in the 2016 version of the client this spring...

What a colossal marketing cockup

Very few people care about networking protocols, and SFB is explicitly a business communication tool, meaning that most of your contact will be with people who also have SFB. As for the About page of SFB, I can't comment on what it was before, but I've just checked, it now says Skype For Business 2016.

douche 3468 days ago

I only know the details because I write software on top of some of the Lync/S4B APIs, and have to deal with customers that are completely confused why one Skype client they have for making calls works with our software, and their other Skype client with a nearly identical icon that they also use for making calls doesn't...

wilde 3468 days ago

Do they have IMAP or ActiveSync disabled? You should be able to find compatible replacement clients.

sithadmin 3468 days ago

No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern.

That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.

toyg 3468 days ago

OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.

jyrkesh 3468 days ago

Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the...

AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.

Sharepoint is to Exchange as OneDrive is to Outlook.

Sharepoint is the server, Exchange is the server. The Sharepoint server hosts Web OneDrive like the Exchange server hosts OWA Outlook Web Access. If you want to use the desktop client for either, instead of the browser javascript, you can download and install the binary.

dragonwriter 3468 days ago

Is it? "OneDrive for Business", as I understand, is (an interface to) SharePoint, and completely, aside from branding, different from consumer OneDrive.

nimish 3468 days ago

OneDrive for Business = rebrand of Sharepoint storage, hence the complete separation from OneDrive's consumer (fka Windows Live Mesh) stuff