“Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint” – A Rebuttal
Author: Marc D. Anderson
http://mdasblog.wordpress.com
One of the great things about open-minded, intelligent people is that they can disagree and still enjoy each other’s opinions. (Yes, you guessed it, I’m saying that so that Bjørn doesn’t just dismiss me right off. He knows me well enough that I don’t think he will, but still…)
Bjørn posted a well-thought-out set of ideas today entitled “Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint“, and I wanted to post my contrarian thoughts on it.
To me, SharePoint implementations in a large percentage of the cases ought to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. By this I mean that if a SharePoint implementation is successful, it will fundamentally change the way people work. We can’t always know what those changes will be in toto because there are many contributing variables, like the organization’s culture, incentive structures, process maturity, leadership style, etc. So starting with slightly adapted “out of the box” functionality can be a very good idea.
Let’s go back to Bjørn’s house building analogy. We bought our house, which is over 100 years old, because we liked the “bones”. We could see ourselves living it in quite happily. Over time, we’ve changed various things based on our actual living style: new paint in a few rooms, new track lighting in the rooms where we felt we needed it, etc. It turned out that we were wrong about a number of assumptions going in. We didn’t actually need to renovate the kitchen, for example. Even with my wife being a personal chef and cooking constantly, it fully meets our needs. So think of the time and expense that we saved in *not* doing the renovations up front. It’s not that the house is just “good enough”; it’s great.
The same thing can happen with SharePoint, but it all depends on the organizational readiness, and those non-technical factors I list above are the indicators of that readiness. If the “applications” that SharePoint is intended to provide are extremely well thought out right up front, then get out the hammers, nails, screwdrivers, and bow saws. But if the need is more of a vague “we need collaboration” or something closer to that end of the spectrum, then starting with out of the box is exactly the right idea.
This may be the difference between me and what Bjørn or Todd Bleeker et al would call “Developers” (see the comments here). I guess that some of my developer stripes may have washed off in the management consulting car wash, but writing code is often the absolutely last thing you should ever do. I’ve said it a thousand times, so if you know me you’re tired of it, but sometimes note cards are the right answer. Out of the box can be exactly the right starting point; I would argue that a SharePoint implementation should never be “done”. As we live in the SharePoint house, we will need to do renovations from time to time, many of them minor, some of them major. It’s all about getting to the right living space for the family. And an organization’s evolution toward a technically supported collaborative environment can be just like that.
Author: Marc D. Anderson
http://mdasblog.wordpress.com
Marc D. Anderson is a Co-Founder and the President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, based in Newton, MA. He has over 25 years of experience as a technology consultant and line manager across a wide spectrum of industries and organizational sizes. Marc has done extensive consulting on knowledge management and collaboration and what makes them actually work in practice. Marc is a very frequent “answerer” on the MSDN SharePoint – Design and Customization forum.
- "Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint" – A Rebuttal
- What is SharePoint Out of the Box?
- SharePoint Out-Of-The-Box: Is this Really a Debate?
I could not agree with your statements more. The beauty of SharePoint is how its functionality differs from business to business. Each place that I visit has a completely different implementation than the other, which never makes for a dull day.
Have you noticed how some developers tend to over engineer solutions instead of discovering an OOTB method inside SharePoint?
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Andrew,
It’s not just developers that do it. I’ve seen too many instances where someone at the management level gets involved and just doesn’t get the point that the whole point of SharePoint is to provide the enduser with a solution to a problem they are experiencing. It becomes “That’s not what I want” rather than “This is what they need”.
End result……..mandates to the SharePoint architect/admin/developer to rip out the OOTB solution that would have worked just fine, provided a quick and simple solution to the problem the end users were having and spend the next 6 months writing code and developing a solution that is complicated and all but guaranteed to break at some point in time.
Of course that’s assuming that the end users use it all.
-Jay
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Marc – I like the definition you provided of a successful implementation “Fundamentally changes the way people work” I’m doing that every day with Out-Of-the-Box 100%, no Designer here.
I’m interested to know if other readers agree with the definition that Bjorn provides for OOB to mean exactly as is, no deleting columns or manipulating views, but strictly use what is there as it pops onto the screen? Not how I see it at all. Sharepoint is a tool, how many tools work themselves? From Bjorn’s perspective, it seems to me that he might argue that even ~using~ Sharepoint suddenly changes it from OOB implementation. I mean realistically, adding a contact to a contact list corrupts the purity of OOB, does it not? So from that extreme perspective that is true, OOB doesn’t make sense, but I think that is it irresponsible to post such an haughty view, especially by someone claiming to be proponent of Sharepoint.
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If you find this article interesting, then you should read Bil Simser’s reply to Bjorn and me as well.
M.
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Thanks, and now I see it is posted here on EUSP too!
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I agree with you Marc. I’ve been working with the Marine Corps for about three years now since they transitioned to WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007. The Marine Corps uses a full spectrum of SharePoint applications from heavily customized MOSS development for overseas use/functionality, to extreme out of the box End User applications at the smaller unit level.
I agree with one of the earlier posts that OOTB does NOT mean as is. OOTB for SharePoint should mean no code development (well, I would include the Content Editor Web Part as an OOTB feature that technically uses ‘code’). I would even say on a superficial level that some basic Workflow design with SP Designer can be considered OOTB with some simple End User training.
Too many people jump right into heavy development for SharePoint without allowing their users to understand the WHY of web collaboration and information management. Heavily developed sites make users feel like recipients of information management, rather than participants.
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Agree completely, and if I compare two deployments in the same company. The value for money/time with a lighter touch upfront and growing it rather than the full hog approach, we are definitely seeing a major benefit on the lighter touch more.
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I couldn’t agree with you more. What’s most important about successful SharePoint solutions is that they solve a business problem. Even if your problem set is very well thought out, you can start out with “out of the box” – as long as your definition of “out of the box” is around configuration, not customization. For example, planning your use of metadata and, when you go to SharePoint 2010, planning how you want to leverage social computing features. That said, even though content should be more important than “pretty,” there is something to be said about having a nice, appealing UI, which may require, as you suggest “slightly adapted out of the box.”
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Marc, I generally agree with your statements. I think you can generally ignore such staunch and polar opinions such as the one offered by Bjørn. I do also believe it depends on what one’s opinion of OOTB is. Working “with” SharePoint instead of against it is pretty much always a good thing, however.
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