SharePoint sucks like a bad relationship

Posted by Double Compile on Tuesday, October 12. 2010

Much of this clever metaphor came from a lunch conversation I had with two gentlemen at OSCON this year.

The only people I have heard saying good things about SharePoint are the ones who are about to install it.

Your guy pals have all heard about this exciting and fun girl, Sharon Point, from one of her friends. They decide to fix you up with her.

You do what any responsible person would do in a new relationship. You Google her. On your first date, you discover she seems like a nice, talented, and well-organized lady. She's apparently pretty popular! Your guy pals congratulate themselves for finding you such a great girl.

This is when the ice weasels come. You find out Sharon Point isn't like other girls.

  • She takes you home to meet her crazy parents.
  • You mysteriously end up being forced to spend more time with her friends, and not yours. You liked your friends just fine, but she says your friends make her feel uncomfortable.
  • When you started dating, you knew she was fluent in French, so you learned French. After all that, it seems she speaks an obscure dialect of French and you often spend hours trying to say the right thing. Most of the time she is just mad at you and refuses to do what you think you've asked. Sometimes you find there just isn't a word in her dialect for what you're asking.
  • She's stubborn and hates diverting from her routine. As long as your guy pals don't want her do anything out of her comfort zone, she is more or less alright to be around, but she refuses to behave a little differently if asked.
  • You heard that she had a ton of skills. Seemingly, she's pretty mediocre at most of them. You could have met a girl who was better at blogging, or one who knew her way around a wiki.
  • Her grammar is horrible. At first you didn't notice, but now you're embarrassed to take her out in public.

In a fit of desperation, you get in contact with one of her old boyfriends for any wisdom he can offer. When you meet, you find him a drained husk of a man, shivering and muttering to himself. He insists your relationship will never work. You should run for the hills.

If only your guy pals knew what horror she can be. They seem to have a good time with her, but when the two of you are alone, she's a vile demoness, confusing and frustrating you to no end. At this point, you probably start dreaming about dumping her.

Fortunately, I'm neither a SharePoint developer nor an administrator. At times, I'm a begrudging user. Hopefully this brought a smile to your face, you poor, poor SharePoint person.


3 Comments for this entry

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  • Hukeshy
    *Beautiful Post! Sharepoint sucks so much i cant believe MS has the Balls to bring it to the market... Dont get me wrong im not a MS Hater, i love that their challenging Google with Bing and some of their other Products are pretty cool too. But Sharepoint is simply a horrible POS
  • David
    *Spot on! Iv'e been in this nightmare of a relationship for 3 years. Now I'm going through an upgrade. She promised she changed, she promised she'd be better this time. Webparts, multiple languages, better dev tools. She's a little better. But at heart, she's still the same old twisted, over-abstracted xml driven web form monster she always was. I have a plan for her though. For the sake of appearances, I'll keep her around. But, I'm going to start cheating right in front of her. I'll use EF, WCF, MVC (stuff from the 21st centry) right in front of her. I'll even bring them into our home. I'll steal her data push it to SQL and do whatever I want with it. If she doesn't like it, she can go to hell. I'll move on to Drupal or FeinCMS or something else that was actually designed to make people productive. My experience with this woman has finally pushed me to hate her entire family. Go to hell MacroSloth. You suck at innovation. All you care about is money and marketing.
  • Rod
    *As a SharePoint Administrator who is not a "husk of a man" who has been doing this since well before it was even known as SharePoint I have to say your post brought a smile to my face today. SharePoint is often rolled out by IT departments much in the same way you imply. And after the honeymoon phase is over and all the hype has gone, and what's left is a mess..... you realize someone should have hired a SharePoint professional who actually has worked with SharePoint from an end user perspective rather than think it's just another "roll out". Don't blame the tool. Blame the business mentality that says we don't need someone on staff to support and manage it. When it comes to SharePoint and all those "options" I am reminded of a line in the movie Jurassic Park; "you were so busy trying to figure out how to do it that you never stopped to realize if you should do it." Poor SharePoint deployments are not the fault of SharePoint. It's because we think that we can become experts in something simply by googling it ;-) rather than hiring an expert. Let me put it this way. If you're going to have your appendix out, do you want the nurse to do it.... or a doctor who has done it 100 times? I thought so.

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