For part of today, I moved our internal IT support from a Trac-based system to a Sharepoint site. I'm making the move because we're starting to use Sharepoint to help improve internal communications and this seemed like a more logical place since our IT doesn't involve any need for Subversion---code repository integration is where Trac really shines, IMO.
Fortunately, we'd only been using Trac for IT support since I started in February, so there really wasn't much in there yet. We'd organized the Wiki into a few categories of information to describe computers, software, printers, network devices, policies, etc. There were really only about a dozen documents and about 20 tickets in the system, so I did all the work by hand rather than trying to script the maneuver.
For those who don't know, Sharepoint is a portal system that allows any user of the system to create lists of custom records very nicely. It's kind of like a dumbed down version of Microsoft Access for the web with some extra connective tissue and less up-front flexibility---it's just as flexible, but that requires doing a lot of extra footwork. We've used Sharepoint as a document management system up to this point, but are now expanding our use to help us in publication tracking and general project management and collaboration---the kinds of things that Microsoft itself uses Sharepoint for.
Now, in order to get this transition to work properly, I had to create some custom lists because Sharepoint 2 provides nothing close to Wiki functionality unless you want to use Word documents (yuck!) without any help linking items together. Since most of our records were concerned with computers, printers, and software, I created custom lists (i.e., tables with the CRUD forms you need) for each of these and then copied the data over (and filled in a bit more than we had before while I was at it). I then customized the prefab "Issue" list template to connect it with these lists. I copied the tickets over and added the extra comments and then created our one actual How-To document to a Word file and stuck it into a document library. After spending the afternoon putting it together, it does the job, but it's just not quite right.
What I really needed was another Wiki, but Microsoft doesn't provide one in 2.0 (the current version, though I understand 3.0 may offer such a thing out of the box) and there's really no simple way to emulate anything close without cracking open Visual Studio. There are some pay for Wiki add-ons, but while the price isn't out of reach, it's not really worth the price if I can just use a Wiki as a separate piece. There are other small annoyances in Sharepoint such as the lack of configurability or that what is configurable is really the wrong kind of configurable. I don't really care that much if I can set the width of the panels in the portal, but it sure would be nice to have an easy way of adding menus to the sidebar or topbar of static pages: sorry, no easy way to do, señor. Bah. Oh, and don't get me started on the lack of RSS/Atom syndication support in a Portal! (Though, techincally, I can write an XSL stylesheet and import the RSS as an XML panel, in this case. There's no non-programmatic way to do the export, to my knowledge, though.)
This pretty much confirms my experience with most Microsoft products. They work great so long as you conform your way of doing things to The-Microsoft-Way. When I worked to develop an Microsoft Access call database a few years back, it seemed that I spent most of my time trying to make my VB code weave through a field of "Not-The-Microsoft-Way" mines. I've faced the same issues when working with creating styles in Word or formulas in Excel or trying to configure the front page of Outlook. My favorite language is Perl simply for the fact that there's no conformance on any level. You can imagine that I don't handle this way of doing things very well.
The other issue Microsoft has is due to their hugeness. It takes a very long time to release product updates. Microsoft hasn't made a major feature release to Sharepoint since 2003. Wikis have started taking off in the corporate environment since then. Three years is a long, long, long time in the Internet Age. Sharepoint is an obvious delivery platform for a Wiki, but since Microsoft hasn't really added any features to it in three years, one can hardly expect it to have any groundbreaking functionality.
These two problems combined with my long-standing distrust of any software for which I can't find the source of a bug by reading the source are the reasons why I dislike Microsoft-based solutions. I don't really care for their business practices, but I don't really expect anything different from such a large bureaucracy.
Microsoft has a problem with agility. Their software solutions are sluggishly developed and new features are static in nature. I assume the highly structured nature of things is due to the massive testing and documentation infrastructure they've built to ensure quality (fifty or more people might be involved with adding a new method to a library), but I think this has ended up creating software solutions that feel stiff and are so often delayed months or years in delivery.
Open Source software can suffer for the opposite reason. The bigger projects seem to do alright because their is such a massive amount of contribution guaranteeing quality. The smaller projects, however, can suffer from a lack of quality because the authors don't put enough emphasis on design and testing and just hack some code together (which works for the smartest developers, but not the average folks like me).
I think Microsoft could definitely benefit by trying to streamline their process and reduce the amount of overhead required to get a new feature. Until they start putting out solutions that are a little more flexible and a little more timely I'm going to have a strong dislike for Microsoft products. Until they open the source (hah!), I'm going to distrust Microsoft products because I know I won't always be able to find the original source of bugs. That's all I have to say about that.
Cheers.
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