A friend related a conversation he had with a Drupal developer. He asked him what he thought about SharePoint.
“I don’t like it one bit,” he replied.
When pressed, here are his objections, and how I would have responded:
With Drupal, you can start out with a streamlined site and add modules as you need them
I don’t really see that as an advantage. SharePoint is an Enterprise level platform. Right out of the box, SharePoint can be configured to provide intranet portals, document & file management, collaboration, social networks, extranets, websites, enterprise search, and business intelligence. And all of these SharePoint “modules”, you could call them, are guaranteed to play well together. Drupal modules, on the other hand, developed by third-party developers, may have to be reworked so that their code is compatible with each new update of the Drupal core.
SharePoint is bloated
Unfortunately a typical response from people who feel they only need a limited subset of the available functions in an application, and feel the others are unnecessary bloat, even if other people do use them. SharePoint services a large, diverse marketplace with many differing requirements. I wouldn’t call it bloated, but rather “feature-rich.”
Drupal is open source
And this is advantageous in what way? SharePoint is backed by a $230 billion company that PAYS their product specialists/developers/project managers/marketing people to make SharePoint a better product and to ensure its success. Capitalism will make SharePoint a far more superior product than what open source could.
SharePoint produces spaghetti code
To the untrained eye, perhaps. But much like learning to read a foreign language, once you understand the syntax and how lines are constructed and what they mean, there is method to the madness. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
SharePoint is too complicated for users
That’s funny, I’ve heard the same thing about Drupal. Just as my mother only uses her computer to check email, SharePoint offers something for everyone, no matter what skill level. Want to use it for document storage? Done! Build a website? Done! Build a workflow to make your job easier? Done! Code an app? Done! There is always something new to learn about SharePoint for any user no matter what level of expertise.
The bottom line is, complaints like these demonstrate a lack of knowledge of the SharePoint product. As Plato once said, “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.” I know from personal experience that the more I learn, the more impressed I am with this monster called SharePoint (and I say that affectionately).
How would you answer those objections? What complaints have you heard that you find particularly annoying?