Hog Tie That SharePoint Server
December 26, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to five tips I need to make SharePoint server purr like a kitten. Well, maybe, oink like a well-fed pig. You can read “Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server — Five Tips” by Briony Smith here. Ms. Smith starts her write up by referencing SharePoint’s legendary ease of use. My first thought was that Ms. Smith has never installed a SharePoint server, but that’s neither here nor there. Quite a few pundits obtain technical expertise via interviews or telepathy. I am not comfortable reproducing Ms. Smith’s five tips. I think it’s permissible to reference two of them and offer a handful of comments.
One of her tips is to use role based access. The idea is that you don’t want to peg people to access. People belong to roles. Roles are easier to administer. I agree. I would suggest that you get your roles organized before setting up SharePoint. Putting the cart before the horse will make you life a bit more complicated.
Another tip that caught my attention was her observation that SharePoint deployments can get out of hand. Now that’s an understatement. My hunch is that Ms. Smith wants to flash some soft yellow lights about the costs and complexity of scaling, customizing, and tuning SharePoint.
What’s left out? Quite a bit. In fact, I think that much of the writing about SharePoint skips right over the challenges SharePoint presents. I am not sure why people are reluctant to describe what’s involved with SharePoint, but it is a mini trend. I may be missing something, but these “it’s really easy” discussions of SharePoint don’t match what I have experienced. Am I missing something? Let’s start with search, indexing more than 50 million documents, and figuring out how to get facets, expert identification, and views working quickly enough to keep users from Googling for an alternative.
Stephen Arnold, December 26, 2008
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