Comments on: Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:01:39 +0000

@liam: I don’t envy you one bit. Sorry, and don’t kill yourself.

By: liam

liam — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:57:13 +0000

You think that is bad? Try taking over a failed Sharepoint project with a ton of bad customizations… My advice is use Sharepoint the best you can. Throw your conscience out the window, employ hacks wherever needed and try to ignore all your best intentions (see: Best Practices) because things are going to get dirty.

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:55:05 +0000

@Santosh: There’s no single way to handle gui customization. The easiest way I’ve found is only using Sharepoint as a backend, and write your own front-end that gets data out of Sharepoint with your own controls. That way you have full control over the markup. I don’t have an answer to your second question.

By: Santosh

Santosh — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:41:43 +0000

How would you propose handling look-and-feel customization?
Also, in case I need to add additional conditional alerts which are not available out-of-the-box, what would be your recommendation? Should we just live with what we have or should we go with the customization per business needs?

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:43:01 +0000

@Anthony Grace: Thanks! I wish I had read the article you point to earlier, now I had to figure all that out by myself :/. Almost no documentation is available from Microsoft, of course.

I’m actually done with the customization on the project that triggered this article, and it’s live and used by over 10 000 people. I must say, the bugs, tricks and hacks I had to do to get there, you wouldn’t believe me. I will try my best to never work with Sharepoint again.

By: Anthony Grace

Anthony Grace — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:28:27 +0000

Emil,

I feel your pain! I’m in the process of branding a MOSS Intranet and was dismayed by the complexity at first, before rolling the sleeves up and giving it some “Irish attitude”! I found the following 7-part series of articles particularly helpful though:

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/10/08/sharepoint-branding-how-css-works-with-master-pages-part-1/

Keep at it,
Anthony :-)

By: KubuS

KubuS — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:44:51 +0000

Emil, you are so true about all the SharePoint shortcomings. I’ve been developing SharePoint based solutions for over a year, and I must say that customizing it is a real mess.

I like SharePoint for its power of integration, but every time a client asks me about a CMS/intranet portal, I advise him NOT to use SharePoint, because of the painful development process (especially with its high price tag!).

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:56:31 +0000

@Marcus: So what should I call it? “Portal” or “platform” is far to ambiguous to make sense to people… and the fact is, most people use it as a CMS of some kind.

About .NET controls. The problem is that virtually all controls that come with Sharepoint are built with a mixed frontend and backend. You can build any controls you want (except if you want webparts, you have to mix them then), but we’re not talking about just any system now, we’re talking about Sharepoint.

About codeplex: Sure, you can download stuff from there and use them instead, but wasn’t the reason you paid immense amounts of money for MOSS to not have to download stuff? The default Sharepoint stuff needs to be much more customizable.

I’ve working in a project where we’re pushed MOSS to the limits, making sure the customer are free to use everything that comes out of the box (all the things you mention). The problem is that the defaults are of such bad quality, that we often have to patch or hack them to make them usable. Or replace them fully by something from codeplex. That’s not a good way to build stuff.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:49:05 +0000

Emil,
I’ve read through a few of your MOSS/WSS postings. With all due respect, I don’t think you quite understand what SharePoint is. Calling SharePoint a CMS system is like calling Exchange (or Domino, if you prefer something non-MS) an SMTP server.
I have to agree with Ben on most of his remarks.
In additon, only a compiled .Net control will have a combination of logic and presentation, and only then, if the developer of the control made it that way.
.Net itself emphasises the seperation of logic and presentation. If what you’re getting out of the box doesn’t suit you, write your own or look on codeplex or any of the other million developer sites (and they’re not “unsupported”, as you state).
Bottom line is, building elaborate internet facing sites based on WSS or MOSS only makes sense if you intend to also leverage the underlying framework for functionality (authentication systems, integration with AD/CRM/Exchange/etc, collaboration functionality, personalization etc etc etc).
Otherwise, that would be like (to use my example from above) installing an Exchange Server as a simple mail relay and – I agree with you there – way too much work.

By: SharePoint noise « Grumpy Wookie

SharePoint noise « Grumpy Wookie — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:32:45 +0000

[...] Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view [...]

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:27:50 +0000

@Ben Robb: Isn’t the purpose of a system like Sharepoint to help you? Sure, you can go through all the hassle you describe above just to get a decent site running, but picking another tool is a much more effective way of doing the same thing. Really, you can’t really think Sharepoint is a good way of developing websites?

1) No matter what size you have, it’s still half the RAM and processing power. No other CMS requires that. Period.

2) That it’s known and partly patched in a 3rd party addon does not make it OK. MOSS adds accessibility problems that most other tools does not have.

3) Yes, you can hack around the controls that are there to save you time.

4) Yes, I know all about hedkandi, it’s just as customized as the site I’m building. That you can add pretty images and custom CSS does not make it a good CMS (or other) tool. You can do that with any tool out there, anything else would be insane. MOSS requires you to hack more than any other one I’ve used.

5) Why do you need to download additional unsupported components to change things like blogs? Really, is that reasonable?

By: Ben Robb

Ben Robb — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:05:07 +0000

Hi – some of your points are valid, but I would say your conclusions are flawed. I think you need to have faith and work through the examples of how to get “better” html output from SharePoint. For *public facing websites*, you don’t really need the majority of SharePoint controls, and you can quite easily remove core.js and core.css from your page via an HTTP handler for anonymous users (this isn’t officially supported, but since it is something than can easily be switched back off, you can quickly get back to a supported state).

Not going to go through your points one by one, but a few things occured to me:

1) VPC size. I don’t know what you’ve been doing to your images, but my dev vpcs are all about 8GB in size. I’d look at optimising your vpc builds…

2) Accessibility. This is a known issue, which the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint is fixing in part. For public facing webs, you have more flexibility, but the editing functionality is always going to be a problem from an accessibility point of view (which is not limited to MOSS, btw).

3) Control adapters can help with OOTB controls such as the menu / nav controls. See the ASP.NET CSS Control Adapters for more info.

4) You can brand SP sites, see for example http://www.hedkandi.com for a more “design” focused example.

5) Branding blogs and application pages – see the “Community Kit for SharePoint” and “SuperBranding”, both on CodePlex.com for examples of how to do this easily.

By: Sean Fraser

Sean Fraser — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:22:46 +0000

Very informative article. And, Yes – Everything you wrote is true.

Though, you can skin the admin interface with some branding elements and colors.

CSS Specificity works flawlessly provided one uses body id ="". Specificity also allows one to overwrite in-line styles (of which MOSS has an incredible amount) by using !important.

As to your comment about SharePoint lack of blogs with detailed help: you can find all sorts of programming help but nearly all of the articles are written by persons that do not seem to have heard about Web Standards. (Heather Solomon being the exception.) And, most of the fixes are ASP.NET 2 complicated.

From the amount of new articles on Web Standards sites (like yours), it seems that MOSS instead of IE6/7/8 has become the new poster child for Web Standards education.

By: MOSS should be spelt MOCKERY - Robert’s talk - Web development and Internet trends

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:01:11 +0000

[...] Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view [...]

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:27:17 +0000

@Anna: It’s great to hear that authorities in Sweden take time to do that kind of tests, and it’s of course sad that they pick Sharepoint for their website. You didn’t test the publishing of things did you? I suspect any testing on the admin interface would fail horribly.