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SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go.
Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta, and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)
PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."
Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, and SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old project documentation completely going away, OMFG].
PMs: "We don't care."
Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring script to copy the things to SharePoint]
PMs: "Stop that."
Devs: "We don't care."
The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.
I wonder if SharePoint has a future in Microsoft's strategy re-alignment.
SharePoint (evolved as Office Server) is a beast of software and many awkward engineering & design choices from the 2003 era are still visible to the end user. And I am not even touching the XHTML tabled based layout with thousands of CSS rules, Silverlight & ActiveX controls, bad WebDAV support, "SharePoint Groups", low soft & hard limits for file size, file count in folders, etc.
It has of course also it good values for companies. Like the Office integration, the Office ribbon UI and some document management options that are missing from Windows Explorer thanks to the failed attempt to release WinFS in the Longhorn era.
Microsoft also discontinued InfoPath, the WYSIWYG form designer that is part of Office 2003-2013 and the InfoPath form services hosted on top of SharePoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_InfoPath
Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?
I suspect the curse of backwards compatibility might cause a problem - there are so many systems that have dependencies on SharePoint (including a lot of Microsoft's own products). I found this page the other day which talks about the non-trivial process of picking the right API for talking to SharePoint:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj164060%28v=...
The diagram trying to explain how the different APIs relate is a pretty good visualization of the problems that anyone trying to refactor SharePoint would face.
>> Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?
It would be better to build something on top of Outlook and Onenote. New file systems will only be useful if the metadata survives email which would require email integration anyway.
You'll be pleased to know that the work item side of Team Foundation appears to be based on SharePoint and they're heavily marketing that at the moment.
Kill me now.
I work in a drawing office at engineering firm that uses Sharepoint. I wish I could even get anyone to acknowledge that there are such things as versions of files. Our backups are destroyed after 72 hours "to save space", emails are copied manually from Outlook to "emails sent" and "emails received" folders in sharepoint.
The cluelessness and lack of interest from either the IT dept. or anyone really drives me crazy. I just get shoulder shrugs from colleagues when I tell them magical tales from the distant lands of version control.
There's may be a case for pushing hard but I'm leaving in September.
Sorry to reply to myself but I have worked in a couple of places now as a CAD operator rather than a Devops. I am appalled at how terrible the IT depts. have been at getting involved at adding value to the business. They seem quite happy to sit back and wait to be asked to do things the managers have read about somewhere.
At the current place the only time I even see anyone from IT is when something needs fixing. I can see multiple vectors for real process improvement.
And I think this will be a feature of many IT depts. If you want to make a positive contribution and be known for making a difference rather than being regarded as some sort of Janitor then you need to get out of your chair and, as Taichi Ohno says: walk the gemba. The gemba is the shop floor where things happen and the place where making a difference is something your customers are willing to pay for. Don't be an IT anchor, ramping up equipment costs to stay in place.
Ha you haven't seen the piece of shit that is HP/CoCreate WorkManager then. Not joking but sharepoint is Jesus' sandals compared to that turd. SharePoint is also at very least 20 times cheaper because you don't need a full $1m stack HPUX pile and Oracle to run it.
It only exists still due to cash back handers.
To an experienced software developer, any document management system is going to feel like a poor excuse for a source code control system. But many businesses live and breathe by their documents and workflows the way development teams do their source code.
It sounds like most of your complaints are about the way the processes were managed rather than SharePoint itself.
Both. SP sucked, and management's use of it also sucked.
If you think Sharepoint is garbage today, you should have tried it in '08-'09. I was at a 100% Linux site where management insisted on everyone using Sharepoint and scrapping out old Wiki and source control systems. The rationale seemed to be entirely because Unix admins cost more. We couldn't even browse Sharepoint from our own machines since it was so broken in non-MS browsers that they had to set up VNC to a Windows box. Most people couldn't install Wine either because IT refused to give local root to anyone. The only way to install your own tools as local root was to violate every security principle by bringing your own box and swearing off any kind of support.
I notice that management in most companies has a bad habit of believing IT will put up with awful tools just because admin staff do.
> a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents
"I resemble that remark". Shudder.
Such fun, a web implementation of a 1980s folder system, with no possible way of doing an "ls -lr". One gets to click every node in a three or four deep hierarchy to look for a document. Shudder, erase from memory.
When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,
Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.
Your comment is witty, but I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files. It's not even about Microsoft or the effects of any of their choices or policies - it's about stupid managers.
My previous employer was switching from just using shared folders and manual versioning (which worked, was accessible, and we had great search tools for it) to sharepoint. Despite almost the entire development floor complaining and objecting to management, their was no changing their mind. My guess is that some higher level exec had a great lunch with some MS salesman.
The result was that next week, people were setting up ad-hoc fileservers and documentation systems to avoid using sharepoint, with half-baked sync scripts to placate management.
I am sorry you had a bad experience with your PMs, but what does SharePoint have to do with creating categories that don't match anything in the product, or with deleting databases prematurely? Search in internal databases is a very hard problem because of lack of metadata, and in my experience it is not solved any better in source control systems than it is in SharePoint.
And, I have personally found SkyDrive Pro, or OneDrive for Business, or Groove, or SharePoint, or whatever MS wants to call it, very convenient and reliable compared to Google Drive (for which the desktop app tends to quit every hour and leave things un-synced, and which has far worse web viewers).
Anyone who seriously tries to make a company adopt Sharepoint should be fired on the spot, be it the IT guy, the CIO, the CEO or the chairman of the board. There is no possible excuse for that kind of stupidity.
So your PM doesn't manage the docs? as in talk to you about what the appropriate output should be and then they collect and handle the organization of it?
You are using a document management system to manage source code? There is your problem with this 'piece of garbage' right there.
IIRC OneDrive for Business is not your average cloud storage but build on top of SharePoint (unlike the normal OneDrive). Therefore this might be some kind of side effect due to way SharePoint handles documents and document versioning. It is definitely unexpected behavior but this might be a reason explaining it without bad intent on Microsoft's side.
Microsoft employee here, not speaking for the company just my own perspective. I work in Azure, but not on this stuff specifically.
Sharepoint has its origins in managing collections of MS Office documents more so than HTML and browsers. It knows about certain document types and tries to do intelligent things with them. It's not necessarily the tool you would use for serving raw data over HTTP with arbitrary Content-Types. (Given the complex and varied rules by which browsers interpret content, I'm not actually sure how one could even do that perfectly securely short of enforcing separate second level domain names for each and every tenant.)
As an old-school software engineer, we used to say the biggest part of requirements analysis is setting customer expectations correctly. It seems fair to say that the renaming of Sharepoint to "OneDrive for Business" has surprised some folks where it behaves differently from plain OneDrive or from raw BLOB store.
"OneDrive for Business" is a branding disaster, as it creates a completely rational link in people's minds that it's the same as OneDrive. In reality, it's a completely different product that acts in different ways.
Sigh.
...and, indeed, these XML namespaces (MS Office and data types) and the CustomDocumentProperties tag are already known to be added by SharePoint, and apparently for well-established reasons (though not ones I understand not being a SP user): http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/30626/why-is-s...
To expand on that, OneDrive for Business (a product formerly known as: SkyDrive Pro, Live Mesh, Grove Workspace etc.) shares the OneDrive branding (and some? interface components) but otherwise bears little resemblance to its consumer counterpart.
IIRC the Office Org owns the SharePoint client while OneDrive proper is handled by the Windows Services team.
Yeah I can completely believe that this would be an unintended technical side effect, a consequence of trying to mitigate some other kind of difficulty that Microsoft's broad userbase might run into. Kind of reminds me of Excel's propensity to helpfully (and destructively) convert dates and zero-padded-numbers upon import.
It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that the internal version has found its way back out; hopefully in turning SharePoint into "cloud storage" they screwed up and sent the wrong thing. Otherwise, that's rather a mis-feature of SharePoint. If there's anyone here who actually knows it (I only generally do, being on the OSS side of the CMS world) I'd be interested to know.
So I'm ascribing this to incompetence and/or bad judgement rather than malice. But either way, still unacceptable.
Sure, but as a cloud sync product it's a "you had one job" situation. Not so much incompetence as a fundamental failure to achieve that basic requirement.
It's not that OneDrive is modifying files "as it syncs"; it's that it involves Sharepoint, which adds certain metadata to documents that it handles, and has probably always done so; here's a stackoverflow question about it from 2010:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-sh...
EDIT: I see that 'ppog has already mentioned this
Microsoft is not the only one. I had saved a special PDF with settings to full screen the PDF on open. I uploaded this to my Google Drive to transfer it to another machine and it completely reconverted the file into another type of PDF which not only corrupted the document but also broke the full screen open setting. This is a really random circumstance, but I was surprised to see GD reconvert the PDF, not store what I wanted "byte-for-byte"
The full screen bit might has been seen as malware and was "sanitized" by their anti-virus.
Google Chrome used to corrupt certain PDF files if I saved them via the built-in PDF viewer. It still might, I haven't touched that button in a while.
I've just spent a couple of weeks "unclouding" everything due to a number of problems like this. I was using OneDrive (the consumer one) with an Office 365 Home sub for doing basic personal finance spreadsheets and it decided to literally destroy the contents as it was uploaded and downloaded from one computer to another. I can't really trust it.
I tried Google Drive before and found it unacceptable that it just leaves links to documents on your local disk. I could imagine that in a network down situation I'd be in the shit.
So I'm here with LibreOffice and local file storage only now and all is good.
I don't buy the supposed advantage of these services any more. I'm just going to lump my ThinkPad around and not worry about where my shit is now (it's with me). I'll keep an offline backup at home and one off site (encrypted).
Try BTSync
If this is true then Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the majority of potential users to switch to OneDrive. Although I can imagine possible use cases altering data without user interaction is unacceptable. What if you had a git repository stored there? (Yes I know this belongs somewhere else but some people might want to do it regardless) Although Dropbox apparently looks at the data to create previews for the Website etc. I have never experienced altered data.
This article is about OneDrive for Business, not OneDrive. OneDrive for Business is for business, as the name suggests. SharePoint maybe slow, but it does have features that users in business like, so having OneDrive for Business behave like SharePoint is fine.
Why risk so much user trust in order to tag some files?
Same question for me. I think it's all about tracking if someone steal files from your onedrive and then they can track who stole it... maybe?
But as a user of onedrive and google drive i can say that their license agreement on onedrive (normal customer) doesn't assume owning your files, while google drives i think is written that they own your files and can modify it without your permission. At least google say it.
Disappointing, but a good reminder to not trust 3rd party services with sensitive data regardless.
ssh user@rsync.net md5 your/file
Shocking that so many bytes would be added to HTML files. If you were backing up website views, this could add a lot of bytes per page request if you published them without realising. Totally unacceptable.
Seriously raises some questions around the whole product, and makes me wonder if we can ever trust any other third-party with any sort of "sensitive" data.
Luckily there exists plenty of FOSS options that provide a close approximation of this functionality for me, though I know they will likely never be an option for the type of companies that rely heavily on things like OneDrive.
They'll probably blame this one on an "error" again, like how they did when it was found out that Skype was MITM-ing https links, or when Bing was censoring stuff from China globally, and even in English, and in a couple of other cases I don't remember well right now. That seems to be their boilerplate PR response whenever some big privacy infringement happens and many are outraged about it.
I'm interested if you have a cite for MITMing hyperlinks. The only thing I see sounds attributable to old fashioned cookies and ad networks.
>Bing was censoring stuff from China globally
That's not a privacy infringement, that just sounds like production code went up to the wrong server.
Yea, but of course the microsoft happy bunnies will go on defending them like the morons they are.
As much as the "new Microsoft" impresses me some parts of the company still seems to believe they can get away with anything. :-/
There is no "new Microsoft". The huge ship has shifted course, visibly, and announced the shift, but that doesn't mean it's completed it's shift, nor does it mean that everyone in the company is completely aligned yet.
While I'm happy that Microsoft is re-aligning with reality, I still don't quite trust them yet. They have a lot of credibility to rebuild.
Reminds me of a few years ago when I said that I thought it was likely the NSA and GCHQ were able to monitor and then inspect without warrants pretty much anything they wanted on the internet, password or not, and I was ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. After Snowden's revelations I see absolutely zero reason to trust anything any of these companies say or do. And I would use them all with caution - especially if it's your startup's patent application stored in onedrive.