SharePoint has been part of my life for a couple of years now, and so I think it’s time to assess our relationship. The first thought that came to mind was ‘it’s such a pain’. If I had a little brother, SharePoint would be it. I thought I’d explore what about SharePoint annoys me the most. One warning before you read my list - it’s a vent. But bear with me…as my ex-bosses can testify to, once I’ve vented I can be quite reasonable.

1. I can never just get the whole list of documents on one page

I don’t want to click to another page and another to see the rest of the contents of the library or results of the search I’ve conducted. I just want to see them all on one page, scroll through them; filter them. Typical SharePoint, you can change the default setting as to how many documents are listed on a page, but no one ever does change the default, and I’m sure I’ve heard a SharePoint implementer mumble something about return times being affected the more documents you list on a page. 

2. When I close a document I’ve opened, the SharePoint page refreshes

Yes, it’s a pathetic thing to complain about, but it just bugs me. The page disappears for a split second, just as my eyes are searching for another document in the list. 

3. The Search function is not reliable

Because of the decentralised indexing configuration of the sites and pages, you can’t be sure that the search function is picking up everything that you have access to. Even if you trawled through every parent and sub-site today and fixed all the settings, if a new site is created tomorrow without the correct indexing setup, you are back to square one. To be fair, there are add-on Search engines for SharePoint, however you really need to be a techie who enjoys working with complex equations to set up and maintain these engines as useful tools.

4. A list is a list. A library is a list but called a library. A discussion board is a list but called a board.  'Site assets' is a library that stores items that you put in your web parts.

I could go on! Once you get your head around things it tends to be fine, but it is not uncommon to hear of site administrators deleting whole pages because they thought the page was an unused library. 

5. It is a free for all

A survey conducted by Axceler, (admittedly a provider of governance tools for Microsoft SharePoint environments) noted that 65 percent of IT managers had deployed Microsoft SharePoint enterprise wide, yet only 15 percent have governance controls. Youch. I can show how that’s going to work out. For Exhibit A; see our network shared drive.

6.  Decentralised administrators 

A further development of the point above, but it’s so big it deserves at least 20% of my vent.

SharePoint is hailed as a tool that enables business units to manage and share their own information, therefore having their own administrator makes sense. They can be more responsive and have a greater understanding of what their business unit needs. 

But wait, they don’t like the corporate colours, so they create their own site template. By setting up this new template they also unwittingly opt-out of hierarchy defaults and suddenly every time someone creates a new library, they are creating an out-of-the box library that has none of the organisational settings on it; which isn’t discovered until a couple of users have saved documents there and realised they aren’t filling out the normal fields when saving a document.  Angst ensues.

7. It’s not an EDRMS

I’ve always been someone who knows what they want, and when I see something I like, I want it. And I want an EDRMS. I don’t want  something that’s got a few EDRMS components that aren’t as easy to use and can’t track hard copy documents (I know, I know, there’s always improvements in new versions, but I still want an EDRMS!!)

8. It’s painful to move things around

So your organisation has a restructure, and things need to be shuffled around. Because of the different configurations of sites, pages, libraries, lists, discussion boards etc. etc., the new location may be configured differently and the migration could hit a wall. Ever tried migrating documents stored on one SharePoint page to another? I know people that have and it wasn’t pretty.  All of the documents were ‘migrated’ but because library setting were different  in the new location, all of the documents defaulted to ‘checked out’ and were not visible until the properties fields were updated and they were checked in. Manually. All 357 of them.  Urgh.

9. It’s marketed as a simple and easy to use option

Which is why there has been such a huge uptake of it, with fast-tracked implementations. Trouble is that organisations grossly underestimate the impact of an organisational-wide change and then continue to underestimate the risks, time involved, configuration requirements…the list goes on. 

10. Nobody gets trained on it…well almost nobody

These days when you join a new organisation it is assumed you are proficient at mainstream email software (Lotus Notes, Outlook), as well as standard Microsoft Office applications. But now SharePoint is included in this list, and the problem with that is that SharePoint is so configurable that it looks vastly different in every organisation. 

I know I’m being a bit unfair when I say that NOBODY gets trained on it. Some enlightened organisations do. The Site administrators do. They get a day’s training where they are shown every possible method of configuration without any governance scope. When I attended my Site Administrator training day I was taught how to delete batches of documents when the library got too full. Well that’s one way I guess… 

So that’s my vent. Thanks for sticking with me, and now for the rational part. 

SharePoint is here and it’s not going away anytime soon. A lot of the problems are caused through lack of knowledge of what the system can do, how complex implementation and configuration can be and a lack of knowledge of how best to fix or change things when issues occur.

IT and RM publications are full of ‘how to get more out of SharePoint’ and ‘The top 10 things you should have in place for your SharePoint environment’. So there’s really nothing new I can say that hasn’t been said. So why are organisations are still struggling with SharePoint?  My ex-bosses at this point would be asking me, ‘so now you’ve had your vent, why do you think it’s still happening, what can we do differently?’

My answer would be that SharePoint is yet another victim of a project that has been poorly planned and thought-out, where impacts have been woefully underestimated,  which has been implemented on an inappropriate budget with a lack of subject matter expertise (SharePoint and business processes expertise), has been poorly change managed, with not enough training done and once the project team has left the building, has been largely left to fend for itself as business-as-usual. 

So unfortunately I expect to continue my rocky relationship with SharePoint for a while, at least until my little brother grows up, or our parents start disciplining it better.  

Kate Fuelling is General Manager and Principal Consultant of One Umbrella Consulting. She is a records management specialist with qualifications in business, project management, training and process improvement.  Kate’s extensive career has spanned the UK and Australia in the retail, corporate, government and non-for-profit sector. Email: kfuelling@oneumbrella.com.au