SharePoint - Bad For Your Health, Good For Your Health
I wouldn't describe myself as a comfort eater, but I keep finding myself nipping in to the house and scouring through the cupboards for snacks. When I get frustrated at the desk I tend to seek comfort elsewhere. So I snack.
The source of my frustration? SharePoint of course. While I am making steady progress in my quest to learn all about it, it ain't half frustrating to work with. Not so much the way you have to work (RDP to server) but that the API doesn't either a) work or b) work like you'd think it would. Yes SPListItem.CopyTo() method and SPFolder.ListItems property, I'm talking about you!
On the flip side I've also found myself needing to get away from the desk completely by some point mid afternoon. A full day of SharePoint would just be too much to take. So, I've been going on about 3 runs a week. Compared to one a week if I was lucky beforehand.
So, thanks to SharePoint I get to enjoy my favourite snacks and I'm fitter than I've been in months! Best of both worlds.
Upcoming SharePoint Posts
Here are some of the "problems" I've been presented with that you might be shocked (relieved?) to hear were quite a challenge in SharePoint:
- 1. Change tracking at the field level
- Imagine a Domino Form with a "Status" field on it. You want a field on the document to record the username and timestamp of all edits to it along with any change in value of the Status. Second nature in Domino. Not quite so easy in SharePoint. Doable, but what a hassle.
- 2. Print friendly button on a List item
- Surprised to see Google didn't know of the solution I came up with, so I'll share it here, as it shows a few useful techniques in use.
- 3. Copy/move items/documents from one folder to another
- Boy, was this a headache! You won't believe how hard this is. Mainly because, as I mentioned above, the API is flaky and confusing.
- 4. Packaging and delivering the project to the customer.
- I've not actually got round to this bit, but I'm neither looking forward to it or expecting it to be quite as simple a task as I'm used to with Domino. I said on Twitter a while back that I'd coined a new saying in my head while working with SharePoint -- "God bless the NSF". Time will tell how hard it actually is.
So, there you go dear inhabitants of planet Lotus. The SharePoint posts aren't over yet, but the end is in sight.
Again, Thank My Customers
Going back to something I said 3 years ago, you still have my customers to thank if you find this website's content useful.
The SharePoint project I'm working on is a actual paying job for a customer. As with all projects I work on I asked their permission to share the geekier coding details of what I'm doing. Happily they agreed, adding:
It's always nice to have online documentation.
Please don't mention the firm's name.
What a refreshing approach. And this from a huge, huge company. Although I'd never mention my customer's names, purely as a matter of principle.
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yes, God bless the NSF! Never have I so appreciated the NSF as when I had a look at Sharepoint. As many have said before, out of the box its great (and I can see why business people buy into it, especially when its free - WSS anyway). But the effort sometimes in doing things that are so so so simple in Notes/Domino is frightening. Good luck. I'm enjoying following this.
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The more I read about the trouble and frustration people have with SharePoint development the more I'm disappointed in IBM's utter failure to market Domino as as application development platform.
If Domino disappears from the marketplace, (which is seemingly happening) it wont be because of the product.
There must be a lot of Sharepoint developers making big money spending ages on Domino to SharePoint migrations! Imagine how easy it would be to migrate apps from SharePoint > Domino.
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Wait! You've struck the Vein Of Truth (tm). If you could make a ton of $$ by working on a simple app forever, why would you think about doing it in Notes? Waaayyy more cash in the old SP bucket...
Of course, I guess one should factor in customer satisfaction (done in a week, on time, under budget as opposed to overdue, overbudget, overstressed)...
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Hi Jake Howlett,
...nice post as always.
Title should be Like this....
SharePoint - Bad For Your Health (need to spend extra time to learn), Good For Your Wealth ( get number of opportunites to earn)
What do you say?
Thanks,
Sreedhar
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Not more Sharepoint nonsense - you would have thought you'd learnt your lesson.
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I appreciate the WSS posts because they shine a light of reality on the product from the "doing" side of it, rather than just marketing-speak.
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now I would love to see someone from planetsharepoint.org dabbling into Domino development.
Would be hard to find someone as good as this blogger, though.
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axel, I second that and give jake few months and he can teach these SP guys a think or two.
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Your comment on field level tracking strikes home for me. I work in the medical field, and an FDA reg pretty much mandates audit trails for all changes to quality records (and most everything is a quality record).
I've used code provided by James Ray for a long time but recently switched to Audit Manager (based on TriggerHappy) and have found Nirvana.
It runs in the background, isn't affected and can't be stopped by the user, tracks changes to RT fields, and provides limited tracking of changes to attachments.
If you haven't tried AM/TH, please do.
So, enough for the advert. How would you even begin to do this with SP?
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With SP it involves the use of custom Fields and "Event Listeners". That's the subject of a future post though...
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1. Change tracking at the field level .
Versioning in in-built featutre in sharepoint 2007 & 2010
2. Print friendly button on a List item
Save into multiple data formats including excel...Printer friendly is simple funcationality though.
3. Copy/move items/documents from one folder to another
Very easy, open library in explorer mode.
Sync offline documents.
Download and moveing doc is a click away.
Strong API to do it from whereervr you want from.
4. Packaging and delivering the project to the customer.
Easy templates, .wsp, .cap & command based deploy,...
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Are you trying to help me or simply prove a point in favour of SharePoint? If you're trying to help then you haven't really.
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