Y B a < SP > H8r? Learn to Love the New SharePoint

If there’s one, strong, recurring theme I’ve witnessed over my 10+ years working with SharePoint and the people who use it, it’s that most folks love to hate SharePoint!  

And for good reasons.

SharePoint is far from perfect – I too have been plagued with deep negative thoughts about the platform. But admittedly, MOST of the time, my frustration has turned out to be my own fault...  

• Rushing into building farms by clicking next>next>next 
• Building tall, rigid hierarchies that followed my company’s org chart 
• Showing enthusiastic power users how to copy their files over with Explorer and build elaborate InfoPath forms 
• Installing free 3rd party widgets to make sites “pop”  
• Crawling EVERYTHING!   

Most of these mistakes were made in my early days of SharePointing, and I learned quickly just how bad they were. Performance would drag, tickets would pile up, and HR folks once asked me to explain why employees’ salary information was visible in SharePoint search results (oops). If you’re anything like me, you don’t often learn things the easy way. So, we repeat these mistakes and keep wondering why the platform is so bad. 

And it’s not just the Admins   

End users have been forced to adopt a new way of doing things that is clunky, confusing, undependable, and slow …then