Comments on: SharePoint Out-Of-The-Box: Is this Really a Debate?

By: Xene

Xene — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:43:35 +0000

An unused Sharepoint license? What a sorry state. It’s hard to understand Sharepoint without actually using it. While you do have excellent capabilities OOTB, you must learn what they do to get the most out of them. Learning Word is no different. You’d be hard pressed to find someone opening Word, and being able to instantly use all the functionality on the first encounter.

In our environment we have one architect/developer who builds our solutions. Millions to tens of millions to build solutions? Phew! I guess I should show him a little more appreciation!

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By: pat clark

pat clark — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:22:47 +0000

“You want to do all that with ‘plug it in and go?’ ”

I agree that’s unrealistic and from what little I know, will rarely happen. But when decision makers are told their organization will get the capabilities they want OOTB, this is what most of them THINK is going to happen. They DON’T think they are going to have to spend millions (or tens of millions!) more configuring it. OOTB seems to be redefined in some cases in the marketing of Sharepoint to give them the wrong impression (either accidentally or on purpose). Maybe I’m dealing with a different market, but there are a lot of large customers out there that are sitting on MANY sharepoint licenses they’ve bought, doing nothing with them except installing them. I think a primary reason for that is decision makers not understanding enough about what they’re buying. It doesn’t help if a term like OOTB that they think means, “I buy it and it works like Word” is overloaded to mean something different than they’re used to.

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By: Xene

Xene — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:54:24 +0000

My questions were mostly rheotorical, because I think, the definitions change for each organization. So then we get back to the heart of your original search, “What IS Sharepoint?” According to everyone’s favorite source of ‘authenticated’ information, Wikipedia states ” SharePoint is a collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing selection of components, web browser-based collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules, and a document-management platform”

You want to do all that with ‘plug it in and go?’ Yeah, you have to configure it, it’s not software, it’s a platform. Can any end-user participate in the process? Yes, they can. Does it add measureable value? Yes it does. Do you have to learn it in order to use it? Yes you do. Do you have help? You’re HERE!

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By: pat clark

pat clark — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:06:39 +0000

Xene,
I apologize in advance if you weren’t asking your questions of me, or if they were rhetorical questions. I agree with you that there are a lot of great capabilities that you can take and customize. My objection is that I have seen Sharepoint sold to decision makers as a product that is ready to go as-is, without any customization by developers OR “information workers”. This is a commonly used definition of “out of the box” for software. When the purchased Sharepoint software arrives, invoices are paid, and it’s installed, then it becomes apparent that only a significant “configuration project” (possibly preceded by a significant KA and requirements definition phase) is required before this is something that will help the enterprise. Redefining OOTB to mean a configurable toolkit/API for information workers instead of for what I term end users (line managers, financial people, proposal people, HR people, etc) seems to be confusing decision makers about what they need when they say they want Sharepoint.. I’m pretty sure when most companies buy Sharepoint, they don’t see information workers as the end users. Many of them ARE trying “to grow top level solutions with specialized apps”.

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By: Xene

Xene — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:17:18 +0000

I wasn’t going to comment again on this topic, but I can’t help myself. Sharepoint definitions are tough to pin down. How can you definately define the end-user? An end-user in my mind is the person at the end of this ‘point of sharing’, the person using Sharepoint (and in most cases has never heard the word “Sharepoint”), but just knows where to get the information they need to get their job done. Recently I read a statistic published from IBM in the Gobal CIO study that stated as much as 30% of the information worker’s time is spent searching for information. Another study by Google states that number is 25%. So across my division if I save each of those 100+ workers 10% of that search time by providing them the resources they need to do their jobs efficiently with a click of a button, that is a tremendous measureable improvement. I do that OOTB, and any information worker with a little tenacity, ingenuity, and organization can do it too – how do you define that? Success!

How do you define Sharepoint? your role with Sharepoint? What it can do for you? Educate some of your employees on how to use it and that definition will start to come into focus. Share your knowledge, and watch what grows from it. If you are only using Sharepoint to grow top level solutions with specialized apps, paying high $$ developers to build you your solutions, you are missing out on a huge portion of what Sharepoint is meant to do. It is a terrible waste to allow Sharepoint to sit idle, to not tap your area experts to record their knowledge to pass on to others. If you start it, even if the rest of them don’t catch on right away, they will. Efficiency is hard to hide for long. Flat out – Sharepoint = success. Success to end-workers in time savings, success to Admins who recognize it’s potential, and huge success to anyone embracing the technology and running with it!

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By: pat clark

pat clark — Mon, 03 May 2010 12:06:46 +0000

I was browsing for info on what exactly sharepoint “is”, and found your article and these comments. I have to agree with Bjorn in the following sense. What I’ve learned about Sharepoint seems to include a desire to claim that it solves a lot of END USER’s problems out of the box. This is done a lot during sales pitches and advertising. For example, many government agencies have bought sharepoint, equating “out of the box” with turnkey, or “that’s all I need to fix my problems”. It is misleading at best to claim that, from what I’ve read. Dessie, it seems like what you’re saying is Sharepoint provides a lot of OOTB capabilities for people configuring Sharepoint to tailor it for END USERS. This is WAY not the same IMHO as OOTB to end users. From a business perspective, there is a huge increase in cost to the business if he has to spend six months and dedicate a team of 10 folks and a subcontractor to “tailoring” the OOTB capabilities. So my “coming in cold” opinion to this discussion is that you are both right in a sense, that Sharepoint is NOT OOTB for a lot of end user apps, but it is very OOTB for a group needing to develop those apps without necessarily going to Visual Studio. From the number of customers I’ve seen/heard of that bought a lot of Sharepoint and then had it sit around doing nothing because they didn’t realize what they would have to shell out after they bought OOTB software, it appears to me that redefining OOTB for these two different meanings may lead to a sales boom for Microsoft, but it doesn’t give the buyers what they thought they were getting when they heard the term OOTB.

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By: Bjørn

Bjørn — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:20:30 +0000

Honestly, for a hig profile public site, I’d stay away from SharePoint completely.

http://furuknap.blogspot.com/2009/09/want-to-use-sharepoint-as-your-public.html

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By: Xene

Xene — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:32:41 +0000

I like the vote of confidence, but let’s not get carried away! My expertise lies in how to creatively use this hammer as a jig for anything that comes my way. My environment is so conservative that they won’t let anyone outside of IT into the server domain, so despite begging, pleading, and fits, I still can’t get into Designer – but I’ve come to realize that I have a tremendous amount of power without it, and I can create solutions that any information worker can support long after I’m gone. Cheaper and quicker than a developer? Yeah, I think so. I work here, I know the process like the back of my hand, so I can crank out a few lists that talk to each other, send OOTB workflow to some people and get some things done. Is is perfect? Perhaps not, but considering the state of what the process was before, even without perfection I’ve blown their doors with the added efficiency. It would take an outside developer at least a few hours to understand the needs.

Would I do the same for a public high profile site, NO WAY! Yes, in that scenario I think Bjorn’s got the leg up, OOTB probably does make sense for high profile situations, but for the information worker, OOTB is pretty impressive – especially since Admins aren’t ready to hand out thousands for me to improve my process, that is completely up to me!

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By: Bjørn Furuknap

Bjørn Furuknap — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:39:39 +0000

Marleen,

I work primarily as an architect and developer, to answer that question first.

I don’t know where you, or anyone else for that matter, gets the idea that hiring a developer is more expensive. Comparisons, however, would quickly turn into a pissing contest (I can work faster than you, I can do more in an hour than you, and so on) and serves no purpose. I would claim, however, that I haven’t yet met an out-of-the-box proponent able to do something like this in less than 5 minutes:

http://www.codefornuts.com/2010/04/building-wcf-rest-jquery-webpart-based.html

What matters, though, is what the end solution looks like today, in six months, and in three years. Developers are trained to think about that and take care to ensure that a solution is maintainable, upgradable, flexible, and, perhaps most importantly, serves exactly the need that a business problem requires.

There are far more situations and business problems that a developer will know how to handle and support than those you can imagine if all you’ve done is out-of-the-box configurations. Remember that the tools you use shapes your mind; if all you know how to use is a hammer, you tend to view every problem as a nail.

Despite what seems to be the general conception, however, I’m not talking out-of-the-box components down. In fact, here’s a direct quote from the blog article that caused all this, the context being that clients often instruct me (and others) to use out-of-the-box as much as possible:
“If using out-of-the-box functionality is a good idea, then it is far more likely that I’ll tell you why it is a good idea” [rather than the client telling me why it is a good idea]

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By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:47:29 +0000

How about calling it “Plug-In” instead of “Middle Tier”? That’s what they call it for every other piece of software I’ve came in contact with… I think that would stop the feeling i get when I see one of these posts: “Ugh, not another one of those posts” At the end of the day, does this really even matter?

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