Bitter Coder - Hacking SharePoint

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I've been working with SharePoint lately, it's a technology of highs and lows... the highs are when you've finally got something to work that should've worked in the first place, the lows are well... all the times in between.

Ok, so that sounds cynical - SharePoint is actually quite a cool product - there's a lot of good in there... stuff that would take you a while to write yourself... but it just tends to drive you a bit crazy, things that look easy from a distance become hard to achieve because of poor documentation, lack of extension points and the difficulty in building testable code.

At any rate, while on this project I've been compiling a list of hacks that other people may find useful, which I used to solve a few of the problems I was hitting while developing... here are the first few:

There are some more coming shortly.

posted @ Wednesday, November 07, 2007 12:04:46 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00) Comments [2] | Trackback | Tracked by:
"More SharePoint hacks" (Bitter Coder) [Trackback]
"A definition of a nightmare platform" (Ayende @ Rahien) [Trackback]
"Nightmare Platform? Or Just Another Way of Working?" (Insane World) [Trackback]
"Sharepoint Hacks - field visibility" (Bitter Coder) [Trackback]

Sunday, November 11, 2007 5:05:07 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

What's your impression of MOSS for Web content management? We're looking at CMS systems and it is difficult to find information about any system that wasn't written by marketing, e.g., anything that doesn't use the word "leverage" as its most common verb.

Matt

Sunday, November 11, 2007 6:59:15 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

I'm not sure how it would compare to a product like Episever (http://www.episerver.com/) - but I don't think it would be too bad - it is the recommended upgrade path from the defunct Microsoft CMS.

Personally I haven't done any MOSS 2007 project's yet, this was just WSS 3.0 with a 3rd party Workflow product... and was a business application (no content management) - but I suspect it probably wouldn't be all that bad ... most of the SharePoint features (in one form or another) lend themselves to CMS - it isn't exactly rocket science in many cases, the fundamentals of a content management system haven't really changed in the last 10 years... And SharePoint designer (in between it's little hickups) is a pretty good tool, allowing you to avoid having to use dev resource to make changes in many cases.

I know a few people who have done or are doing CMS projects with SharePoint - I'll ask around next time and see what peoples experiences have been like pre and post deployment.

Alex Henderson

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