Why I Hate SharePoint #2

Ok. Some content. I've just picked a few of the issues that I've encountered in the last couple of projects.

Now to be fair, SharePoint is a large complicated piece of software with some serious legacy issues. Producing a bug free piece of software is non-trivial and some would argue not even possible.

However, given the resources for development and testing, and the push SharePoint has from MS as a flagship product, they really should be able to do better than this.

1. If you create a Picture Library called "Images" (some might consider this an obscure name for a picture libary) then you then can't turn publishing on.

2. Say you have a site template that you want to generate a new site template from. So you install the original site template .WSP, you generate a new site from the template, and then you make all the modifications you need. But you don't want to have to include the old site template as well, so you remove it. Your modified site works fine and there is no issue... untill you go to generate the new site template, which will now fall over in error. And there is no way to rectify this. Once the original solution is deactivated, you don't even have to remove, you can never generate a site template again.

Actually the SP Solution Exporter class and its dependancies seem to be one of the weakest pieces of code I've encountered for a long time. It falls over from so many different things. Here is another example.

3. I have a sub site that wants to have a list web part where the list is in the parent site. There is a solution where you create a similar web part in the parent site, then export it as a web part definition, then import it into the sub site and then create a new web part from it in the subsite. Everything works fine... until you go to generate a new site template, which again falls over in error.

4. Compare the user experience with a simple choice control to the SP 2010 metadata control. The later aint pretty. Sure it's got to do a lot more but the user shouldn't have to suffer for that. It screams for an improved UI and probably some server side caching and prefill.

5. If you add a metadata column to the blog comment list the user gets a correlation ID error page every time they add a comment (though the comment does get added). The reason is because the blog team thought that the best way to clear controls was to set the Value property to null, while the metadata team thought that nobody would ever set the Value property to null (though the error you get says something like you have passed a multi-value metadata value to a single value metadata field or vice versa depending on whether the metadata field has the multi-value box checked or not.

6. You can't generate a site template from a site that has had publishing turned on. Actually you can but the link to do so has just been removed. If you turn publishing back off, then the link reappears, but if you look it up on the Internet, Microsoft say your solution is now unsupported. From reading on the Internet, it appears this bug was first discovered during early testing of SharePoint 2007, but has since been redefined as a feature so will now never be fixed as evident in SP 2010. (How the hell does anyone call this a feature) And why isn't there a wanring when you generate the site template that it won't be supported? What if you weren't the person who turned publishing on and back off?

7. What does the SP team think that you will only ever want to change the master page if you have turned publishing on?

8. Why does Quick Luanch and Top Nav have to be moved and renamed when publishing is turned on, now in the Navigation link called Current and Global nav?

9. Why did we get all those arguments in SP 2007 about calculated fields can only be recalculated when the specific row or the list definition is editted BECAUSE of  security and performance, only to have these sames reasons thrown out the window in SP 2010. This of course is an improvment in SP 2010, but it certainly makes you wonder about the real reasons.

10. And why we are on the subject of calcualted fields in SP 2007, what is the point of all those statistical functions being supported. It's not like you can aggreagate across all items in a list, and some of them are so obscure that you have to wonder about their inclusion, especially when more valuable functions were left out, like looking up a value on a different list.