[jjkaczor]

Ugh... see - they didn't "get it".

The point of SharePoint was to allow end-users to cobble things together themselves. One of the original design philosophies was "Excel on the web", hence the reliance on it's Lists as a core data structure (as inappropriate as it would of course become, when users started treating them like giant RDMS stores). My anecdata is from talking to some of the original design team members, from when Microsoft acquired it from VTI.

It was originally not intended for developers, it was for power-users. The fact that it was built on .NET technologies made it extensible though, and boom - quickly enough there was a huge market.

[whstl]

Well, here's the thing... you're not wrong. You're actually 100%... scratch that, 120% correct!

Software shouldn't really be a constant struggle. It shouldn't be about constantly forcing square objects into tiny round roles.

However, when you're an experienced developer that's easy to see. Sometimes even when you're inexperienced it's also easy... But when you're upper management, and a developer says "we shouldn't do that in Sharepoint" while Microsoft is telling them "this is 100% possible in Sharepoint" and the Microsoft approved consultancy says "this is extremely easy in Sharepoint", the developer ends up looking bad! :(

[arethuza]

One approach to dealing with that is to then suggest that if things are so easy then surely the consultancy would be willing to do the project on a fixed price basis?

[whstl]

Yeah, that would do the trick. But then again, in companies with thousands of employees this kinda things tends to get lost in translation between the multiple management layers, or when some over eager product manager decides to make their life goal adding some weird customization to SharePoint at any cost possible :/

[krylon]

It does allow people to build useful things, I'll give them that. But our company didn't have any power users, so us admins got handed the task of doing that as well. (manic laughter)

[jjkaczor]

Heh... I had a client, as recently as 2020 who barely had "users" - who didn't know how to perform basic computer operations (Cut/Copy/Paste, navigate menus, etc).

Hell - yesterday, I was working with a DBA over remote screen-sharing who had no idea how to enable the display of line-numbers in his preferred SQL text editor... (Or even that you have to press "OK" to save your changes in a modal dialog box...)