A call for grievances: what do users hate about SharePoint?

Later this month I'll be speaking at the Dallas/Fort Worth SharePoint User Group, along with Pete Henehan -- long-time MCT and my distinguished colleague at Improving .  Together, we'll be exploring simple ways to improve user experiences with SharePoint.  To make that talk more effective, I'd like to hear from average users about what you hate, what you need, and what you just wish the IT people would understand. 

No technical terms are necessary; there's no official form and nobody will grade your terminology.  I just want to know what's keeping this license-selling behemoth from getting traction with regular business folks.  Is it just a general aversion to change, or are there concrete, identifiable improvements that could be made if someone would just listen?

Fire away.

13 Comments

  • Cost, and true (non hack) list relationships.

  • Every sharepoint deployment I have ever seen suffers from one problem.

    Unless you save the link, you'll never find it again.

    It's not for lack of search, it's that nobody defines a hierarchy to organize sites.

  • The way permissions do not cascade down from the parent when setting up lists on a site.

    Lists suffer from performance issues when there are over 3000 items in them.

    The total lack of any documentation for developers.

    All the hacks you have to do on the development machine to enable custom sharepoint application pages.

  • I'd like to have out-of-the-box column level permissions and better integration with Visual Studio for custom development.

  • Please add the ability to define list relationships

  • Lack of Visual Studio integration; poor developer documentation; rigid and unextensible API's which are thin veneers around legacy COM and XML cruft; expensive and requires infrastructure (database admin, SharePoint admin) to do anything other than out-of-the-box activities; hard dependency on SQL Server and Windows Server.

    I could go on, but the process of enumerating these deficiencies is making me ill...

  • - ugly

    - does search really work?

  • Thanks for the good feedback so far.


    @mxmissile: can you elaborate on exactly what you want out of list relationships?

    Factors like the cost of MOSS are beyond the scope of what I'm trying to do here :) If you need cheap/free, you can run WSS on SQL Express.


    @sodablue: are you saying that search never seems to work the same way twice, or that people don't use it?

    Hierarchy is a sore spot and something I intend to address.

  • My complaints are almost exclusively around installation and deployment. I'd like:
    *A letter developer test setup experience
    *Web Platform Installer installation
    *Vista support
    *Solution package deployment from within Visual Studio

  • 1. color, need something graphical to visually organize
    2. list relationships
    3. bread crumbs <--- suck even more when you discover there are page and site.

  • I am constantly battling different user experiences based on the browser you use to access SharePoint.  FireFox and Safari users are left out in the cold unless you make some modifications (e.g. R.A.D. controls for editing list items).  Even then the user experience is just different.  This can lead to confusion on the part of the users.

  • I think more consistency and functionality in the UI regarding Content Editor Web Part, and page editor web part. Make things easier for insertion of hyperlinks, images, and tables.
    Ease the abitlity to render content from different site collections or web apps in a single page.
    Make it easier to enable publishing features on non-publishing sites.
    Expand the functionality of stsadm to include the complete abiltity to manage any setting in a farm via command line.
    Increase interoperability with other technologies such as MS Office Communications Server, MS System Center Configuration Manager, and MS Office products.
    Include the ability for products like MS Visio and Infopath to create web pages compatible with SharePoint and SP features such as master pages.
    Increase the ability for security to be controlled at more scopes than just farm or site/site collection. Security at web app scope would be nice. Add centralized tools for security reporting and management.
    More practical application examples and/or tutorials. Users can be trained on how, but not on why.
    Allow more centralized configuration capabilities such as the ability to control alternate style sheets, logo paths, portal paths, master pages, etc on a more global scale through centralized tools.
    Make it easier to move entire container objects such as lists and libraries between sites in a site collection or between site collections.
    Add the ability of a site template to be preconfigured and retain security, workflows and other settings.
    That should get you started....

  • A OOB gantt that actually has functionality and adjustable granularity. Also the ability for it to work with calulated date fields would be nice :(

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