A series of quotes from the blogosphere from people who have endured the pain of developing applications with MS SharePoint

3. I think SharePoint sucks, and if you are considering going for a new platform for your collaboration or your publishing or your wiki or your blogging needs, choose differently.

4. If I want a good blogging solution, why would I want a mediocre wiki site, a mediocre document management solution, and a mediocre web content management solution, bundled with a mediocre blogging solution? This won’t give me anything I need, compared to getting a good blogging solution and a good wiki solution as separate products.

5. SharePoint has many quirks, performs like a milk van on a steep slope and makes most developers moan

6. As was explained to me, Sharepoint is like having your kids put your laundry away. You know where you put it, but they put it somewhere else. Or, it's like telling someone that what they are lookiong for is in Alabama. Technically correct, but useless.

7. One of the things I've noticed on blogs, user group meetings, etc., is that all of the most successful projects seem to be 'SharePoint and something'. SharePoint and a better blog. SharePoint and a WCM system. SharePoint and a real RM system.

8. Sharepoint is terrible for a developer. If you can deal with the huge limitations out of the box and don’t have to do any coding or customization, OK. Otherwise, you’re better off using another platform.

9. Sharepoint: simple to use out of the box, impossible to customize.

10. IT'S A COMPLETE PILE OF SHIT. With sugar on top that appeals to owners and CEOs and they they realize later what a mistake it was to even use the API.

11. I have purposely stayed away from any job opportunity that mentioned coding in SharePoint. As soon as I hear that in an interview or even see it in the job description, I flee. I stop right there and pass the opportunity because I have been in environments that think SharePoint is this end-all solution when in the end it's a complete API pile and in about 2-3 years you end up having huge costs involved after spending money coding (hacking around the shitty API and everything else that SharePoint throws in your face)

12. SharePoint's support of non-IE browsers is horrible.

13. Customers are easily impressed and sold when a salesperson, whether that person is a consultant or a bone-fide seller, demonstrate how easy it is to hack together a working proof-of-concept. When a real architect or developer enters the project, customers are shocked to learn that developing a SharePoint solution is nothing different from any other software development project and is a lot more expensive than the impression left by the sales process.

14. Development is a royal pain in SharePoint.

15. Writing custom code for SharePoint is like wearing handcuffs,

16. Developing in Sharepoint is like swimming in a burning river, with your arms and legs tied to heavy rocks!

17. Stuff that takes 10 min in e.g. aps.net or WinForms, takes hours / days in Sharepoint

18. It is one of the most unflexible applications I have ever used.

19. Far too complex to install, configure, and customize. It is not agile.

20. It’s a perfect example of trying to build something that does everything, making the software so complicated that it is so hard to use, that it is useless.

21. I work for a large company - trying to do the basics, and essentially it's become a career to get Microsoft products to work. I just wanted to create a dashboard and took me days to figure out how to do this on SharePoint. Waste of time.

22. It is far more easy too learn J2EE, Ruby On Rails, C++ multi-inheritance or any other than than the sharepoint architecture and permissions and mysiotes, and sites subsites, lists, wikis and excekls, and kpis all together

23. I tend to agree that Sharepoint sucks. Using it is like closing your eyes, holding your breath and spinning around for thirty seconds. When your done you dont know where you are, you are very dizzy, and feel like you might throw up…

24. it’s not very user friendly, and searching for a particular document, library or list on a Sharepoint site can be at the very least problematic

25. STAY AWAY… Sharepoint can be an incredibly useful tool, but in any office where I’ve seen it deployed, it’s acting merely as a web-based front-end to the file-system.

26. I hate Sharepoint with the passion of 10,000 burning Lotus Notes users

27. Honestly, I found Sharepoint so inadequate and typical of a first generation MS product that I could only shake my head at it. If it was made by anyone else than MS and had to compete on its merits I suspect most of us would have never even heard of it

28. I've developing under sharepoint for the better part of this month and I have to say Sharepoint sucks big time. Sure, as long as you need only the basic features, you're fine. But when you decide you need something extra, even if it's so simple a web developer would implement in an hour (say voting for documents), then you're in for a ride. Developing for sharepoint is nothing but a nightmare. The system is overly complex, unintuitive and just plain bizarre. I swear, we've spent almost a week trying to implement some of the features, when we could have written a fully functional php/postgresql site in that time.

29. Share point sucks ****. It is confusing, the documentation is little or absent. However, all the higher ups at my corperation have accepted it with open arms because the consultants told them too. The consultants are now getting paid 60 dollars an hour to teach it. I hate share point.

30. I've been DEVELOPING with Sharepoint for a YEAR now. IT SUCKS, IT SUCKS, IT SUCKS....

31. The bottom line is that the team in charge of developing sharepoint sucks (believe me I am an ex MS employee).

32. SharePoint is only good for what it was developed for: Collaboration. I think where SharePoint begins to suck is when management is sold on the fact that EVERYTHING needs to go into SharePoint. Then developers start thinking that SharePoint sucks...because if applications are expected to be developed in SharePoint, well, it sucks.

33. My company believe it's a document control system. Huh! Nowhere near it and definitely not 'out of the box'. A consultants dream to milk unsuspecting users of the platform. Absolute rubbish to use

34. Our web guys can barely make the thing work correctly, so how are end users supposed to make it work correctly and design sites that are easy for others to use, navigate and find information? We are going to end up with a bunch of lists and shared folders that store Word, Excel, and PPT files with absolutely no context to the documents and thousands of different ways that teams and "site admins" will use to present information.

35. I am a SharePoint admin guy for my department, and have attended a $1500 SharPoint course that took two days. It is not intuitive, and follows little of Windows years of established PC convention

36. i have noooooo idea how this is making things better. All it does is it makes you buy more MS products and makes you buy a MS SQL server - The pathetic part is that i have to sell this to my users

37. Holy ****, ****ryin out loud! I hate SharePoint. There is absolutely no Software Dev process .... God Speed to you developers who choose to suffer with this any further.

38. Sharepoint is great if you are going to use it OUT OF THE BOX ONLY, otherwise SHAREPOINT IS A PIECE OF GARBAGE

39. The object model has countless nuances to work around even for doing simple tasks. There are 3000 poorly named variables for each object. Half of them don't work as you'd expect so you find yourself either copy/pasting previous code you've spent 3 weeks developing to add a single list or you find yourself spending 3 weeks developing code from scratch (1 week in the documentation, another 2 weeks on google trying to find another poor soul that has dealt with the same issue).

40. Aside from the “it’s a pain to work with factor”, it doesn’t even live up to it’s intended purpose,

41. I get paid doing this sharepoint crap and what a waste of corporate time and money, I personally don’t care, f*ck my company and their like, but if it were my corporation I would be upset to see my developers building sharepoint based CMS. WTF, this thing is really useless crap.

42. Once I got a look at SharePoint at the evil-empire, I thought how typical of Microsoft to tout something that is not just a nightmare, but ineffective

43. The difference between wikis and sharepoint is that sharepoint sucks.

44. If SharePoint wasn't a Microsoft product, slim change anyone ever heard about it. SharePoint is great on paper, but a horrible product for developers and end users.

45. The only people who like it, are people who never seen any other product, and people who can make money from installing, designing and updating it.

46. I've been at three companies where SharePoint was "implemented". Someone set it up and expected developers and such to use it, but no one could figure out the purpose of it, or how to navigate. At two of these companies, MediaWiki was implemented and quickly took over most of what SharePoint was trying to do (but then, we never could figure out what SharePoint was for).

47. It's true that no one would use SharePoint if Microsoft didn't bundle it with corporate packages. This software is just crap.

48. Developing SharePoint Web Parts and applications sucks. And we're not even using all of the features of SharePoint (THANK GOD). After the excitement and relief that came with .Net Framework with Visual Studio it's like trading a perfume bath with horse crap.

49. If you ever tried to clone Sharepoint, you know Sharepoint sucks. If you ever tried using Sharepoint with anything else but IE and MS Offie, you know Sharepoint sucks. If you ever need to login as different users on Sharepoint, you know Sharepoint sucks

50. I was all happy about it until they said I had to convert it to Sharepoint. I took a look at Sharepoint and I threw up in my mouth a little. It’s the worst piece of crap there is. Like you said, it doesn’t even do ajax right. It quite simply, sucks. There are way better alternatives. But like you said, too bad corporate america is stuck on that.

51. It is bloatware, lacks efficiency, overly complex and simply mediocre. I consider this an enterprise virus.