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by BlameKaneda 1323 days ago
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.

2 comments

> I'm on Job 3 now and I grimaced when I saw that the company used it as its intranet

Sadly it's Microsoft Teams' backbone, so it's used far and wide still.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/sh...

This was very similar to my experience with the "greater Sharepoint ecosystem".

At one point, maybe still today even, MS was pitching SP as a great environment to build and run custom apps inside of.

I put a lot of time and energy into trying to leverage SP in this way -- the result was extreme disillusion. Underneath the covers, believe me you do not want to "see how the sausage is made."

Around the same time one of the Sharepoint evangelists (or similar) wrote an article explaining that Sharepoint components/features (WIKI for example) were "never intended to be best-in-class or even close to it"

I mean, WTH that kind of statement should not instill confidence in anyone.