SharePoint and Search: Questions Arise
March 6, 2015
SharePoint search has delivered the best of times for consultants who get paid to make the system work. For users, SharePoint has been a contributor to bad findability times.
I read “Excuse Me SharePoint: A Crossroads or an On-Ramp?” Let me cut to the main point: No one knows. I know that I don’t want to be road kill in the busy intersection of high expectations and massive cost overruns.
I have an opinion. But first, let me call your attention to this statement from the write up:
They [a cadre of SharePoint “experts] acknowledged enterprise users’ frustrations, which Holme called more of a communication problem than an IT problem. In the past, Microsoft was way behind the industry in implementing new features and has gone to implementing them so rapidly that an item a company demoed yesterday might be gone today. The focus tends to be on the end user, which isn’t always the most useful for an enterprise. And in 2015, a lot of organizations are still trying to figure out SharePoint 2013.
For me, SharePoint is an opportunity to make money. Customers drink the Microsoft Seattle latte and believe three things:
- SharePoint is the operating system for the organization. Hey, everyone uses Word. SharePoint is just like that.,
- SharePoint does many things really, really well: Ease of use, document management, search, collaboration, etc.
- SharePoint search is the state of the art in finding concepts, people, facts, you name it.
The reality is that SharePoint does many things, but none of them is exactly what the customer believes. Most of the functions can be made to work with sufficient money, expertise, time, and management patience.
The problem is that consultants want to sell their SharePoint expertise. Those engineers with hard won SharePoint expertise, like and Oracle database administrator, have little incentive to explain certain aspects of the SharePoint decision. Users are clueless and senior managers pre-occupied with sales, litigation, their compensation package, and personnel issues.
Getting the truth about SharePoint costs, complexities, weaknesses is difficult. When it comes to search, the number of third party alternatives makes one thing clear—SharePoint search is not as good as third party solutions.
So what? Well, you get to spend more money for a utility that should work. That’s good for the third party vendors. For others? Well, like the future of SharePoint, no one knows or no one is saying.
Stephen E Arnold, March 6, 2015
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