Mike Drips published an article today on Informit.com titled "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint." I have a few issues with his points. Please read his article and then my comments below. (The numbered items apply to the five things in Mr. Drips' article.) Feedback is encouraged!

Things Wrong in "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint"

#1. It's a crappy mish-mash of multiple technologies

"...you find a great many of the core files are written in JavaScript."

My definition of "a great many" would be somewhere between one-third and one-half. I looked in the "60" directory on my server. It contains 408 folders and 6,324 files. The number of JavaScript (.js) files: 39!! That is .6%.

While Microsoft training does not offer a class on JavaScript, there is no lack of training providers.

Mr. Drips complains that professional programming SharePoint requires knowledge of many technologies. Let's look at this list:

By the way, the same list of technologies applies to the blogging tool used for to write this post: dasBlog.

#2. The development team is playing the Longhorn card

While "four years of no product improvement" is likely, how many enterprise-wide applications are upgraded by customers every year? The required investment in migrating and testing makes it hard to justify repeated upgrades. (I have seen many organizations with Windows 2000 servers still running because the applications they support are working fine.)

#3.  There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing

• How many Office products are there? (http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/compare.mspx)
  
• How many Visual Studio products are there? (http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/)
  
• How many Windows XP products are there? (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.mspx)

I don't think this should be "tagged" on SharePoint when it applies to a lot of the Microsoft product line.

#4. Support for SharePoint is lacking.

In my experience, blogs that are written about a product are usually focused on solving problems, not being critical. Maybe it is just the echo chamber effect...

I think it is wrong to categorize "nearly all" the bloggers as apologists for Microsoft. I don't apologize for Microsoft. I am trying to help others.

Things Right in "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint"

#3. There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing

As I mentioned before, this applies to a lot of the Microsoft product line.

#4. Support for SharePoint is lacking.

Is it time for Microsoft to close down the microsoft.public.sharepoint.teamservices newsgroup?

In my biased opinion, there are other good community resources not mentioned: SharePoint Blogs and SharePoint University forums.

5. Microsoft has not stated a strategic direction for SharePoint

Sad, but true. There is a lot of "customer evidence," but I can't find a roadmap.

Mr. Drips' conclusion, however, is somewhat positive:

Despite its lack of support and direction from Microsoft, SharePoint Portal Server still remains a viable product for an Intranet portal, document library, and company forum. To make all of those pieces work takes a tremendous amount of effort and education that — unfortunately — is not readily available to the end user community.

I am doing my best!! The Intranet Portal aspect is covered on IntranetJournal.com.

When using document libraries in SharePoint try to avoid the temptation of creating nested folders.
Edward Ferron: SharePoint Tips #1

I wholeheartedly agree! I have lost count of the number of times that I am asked why documents in a folder are displayed inside a web part. The "list" nature of document libraries is just not compatible with folders, IMHO.

I went so far as to create a document library template that has a text column named "Folder" and groups the entries on that column.

The latest article in my SharePoint series on Intranet Journal went live today:

 Enabling Users to Maintain SharePoint Content

While most of the beginning of the article is basic coverage of the Content Editor Web Part, this article lays the foundation for the discussion of tools and techniques to help site users post and organize content with minimal technical assistance. In the months to come, I will cover these tools (custom Web Parts and custom Web Part Page templates) in depth.

I welcome your feedback or article ideas.

I have been completely busy for the last few months, but I do have some posts in the queue:

• A review of the SharePoint 2003 User's Guide (Hint: so far, I LOVE IT!)
  
• FabriKam 3.1
  
• O/R Mappers. Specifically, Paul Wilson's and Microsoft's
  
• Interesting SharePoint WebParts

As always, your feedback is welcome.

Hey, I’m Tony Schreiner, a developer on the IE team...There have been a lot of questions and speculation about IE7's tabbed browsing feature, so I wanted to give an overview of some of the work we've done that you can look forward to seeing in Beta 1.
IEBlog: the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog

Great information about the current thinking going on within the IE team. No mention of a date, however. 

KnowledgeBase RSS Feeds - Select a product

Microsoft Download Center

MSDN Subscriber Downloads

MSDN Just Published

Powerful stuff. DasBlog, we they suck less!

Scott Hanselman

The next article of my SharePoint series on IntranetJournal is now available.

Part 4 describes a method for integrating a legacy Web application inside a SharePoint site.