These five things barely touch the surface of what' really wrong with Sharepoint. Here's my top five favorite things to hate about it:
1. No built-in support for RSS generation, or user-friednly way of displaying RSS
2. Very weak discussion group support (this should look much more like proboards.com)
3. No automatic dmoz-style directory of sites and sub-sites
4. Very weak in-page content editting. Everyone resorts to putting content inside document folders, instead of displaying document right on the page.
5. No support for wiki-style content with auto-generated top pags, recently updated pages or dead pages.

I sure hope they fix these five things for the next release.

R.

Those 5 critisims are pretty valid in my opinion. #1 (mish-mash of technologies) may be tough to avoid, but it's still annoying. Honestly it felt like he plucked all of this stuff from my head! It could be much easier...

Richard,

1. When the product was nearing release (in 2003), RSS was much less visible. Were there any portal/collaboration products back then that had RSS?

2. I agree!

3. ?? According to dmoz.org, it is a human-edited directory. How does that happen automatically?

4. I see this as a training issue.

5. In my opinion, the Content Editor web part is easier for the salesman and office manager that a wiki.

With respect to the "mishmash of technologies" I agree, but not to his explination. Many projects and products incorporate CSS, XML, XHTML, .NET Assemblies (he can't really say VB.NET/C#/VS.NET... it's the .NET Framework), and ASP.NET. My gripe is more with using old technolgoies when they just flat out aren't needed. Look at the site definition files and you see sealed web bots. Web bots? You've got to be kidding me!

Here are some of my main "issues" with SharePoint:
1. Minimal seperation of presentation and data (see: ghosting/unghosting). I have YET to understand or have it explained ot me (even by product team members when @ TechEd in Orlando), other than for performance reasons, WHY this is even in SharePoint. Once a page is opened in FrontPage and saved, the UI is now locked. If your company has a rebranding campaign or wants a uniform look and feel, you're stuck... or you go get the GhostHunter WP and let it do it's magic, only to leave yot to "fix" what you "broke" in the unghosted page.

2. Security Presentation. The model adopted was "show all, when user tries to do something they aren't allowed to, tell them then." Again, performance reasons I understand, but I can't tell you how much effort we have done to modify the UI to remove things that readers & contributors can't do (remove the Site Settings link for example). This is BY FAR one of the biggest subjects of support calls into our help desk. When I ask, I hear "but user training could solve that." I reply "but when it's proposed as a enterprise portal product, you try to make that sell when you have a 15,000 user audience... the cost of training WAY OUTWEIGHS the licensing, development, support, and infrastructure costs."

3. Site definition files (CSS, HTML, etc) are horribly bloated and poorly written. What's the best, and recommended way to create your own site def's? Copy an existing one and make your changes to the copy. However, the code within the actual files, from the HTML to the CSS is all over the place. See #1 about web bots.

4. Configuration files. Great idea, use XML... seriously, I'm not being a jerk. But the fact that there are so many scattered across the server product is frustrating. This specifically related to the site definition files.

5. [this is a repeat from Mike's post] SUPPORT/Documentation - There are a TON of SharePoint bloggers and a lot of activity in the newsgroups... but for a product so big, and so vast, the newsgroups need to be more segmented. The bloggers are great... I'm one of the minor SharePoint-ers, but blogging is more of a publication medium than a collaborative one (although it does foster collaborative ones). There are hardly ANY articles or discussions out there about creating custom site definitions, customizing the look & feel of SharePoint, customizing search, building custom webparts from SharePoint lists with CAML... etc. The last one is huge. Until the last few months, NO ONE IS TALKING about CAML. A few tools have been thrown out there recently, but that's it. How do you learn? Someone I highly respect in the SharePoint community could only suggest "modify what's out there and see what it does." I've seen CAML in some course agenda's, but I need more. So do others, I've had numerous conversations with some SharePoint MVP's about the lack of this dicussion. I think a CAML book, soup to nuts, would sell like hotcakes.

Whew... touched a nerve. I like SharePoint... I really do. I just find myself fighting with it more than I feel like I should. It's loved by my users, but I know I could do so much more. So I provide feedback and hope it's incorporated in future versions! Healthy discussion Paul!

"In essence, SharePoint Services is a subset of SharePoint Portal Server."

Windows SharePoint Services is not a 'subset' of SharePoint Portal Server. I hear this quite often and it always bothers me a little. It's almost like saying (back in the day) that a Volkswagen is really just a stripped down Porsche or that Windows XP is just Tablet PC Edition with all the tablet stuff ripped out.

Windows SharePoint Services is a PLATFORM and SharePoint Portal Server is an application built upon that platform.