Maybe Not?
February 17, 2008
There has been a reason for not updating here in a long time.
The burnout factor in trying to make SharePoint work is of course a factor. But more than that, we’ve finally started trying to architect our first major apps in SharePoint. That effort has shown just how short SharePoint falls. All the people who have been pushing SharePoint, saying that its “out of the box” functionality can build entire apps have realized that that is not true.
The final conclusion is that while SharePoint can handle maybe 30% of any given apps functionality out of the box, the other 70% needs to be covered by BizTalk, .NET coding, and other Microsoft technologies. SharePoint is not living up to its marketing.
The most ironic part of it all is that SharePoint shares exactly the same weaknesses as Notes. So if we did move entirely to SharePoint, we’d still have a system that is weak on reporting and on transactional processing.
Our management team is re-evaluating SharePoint, and might reverse their decision to move there. Or might not. But the discussions have been re-opened. 
February 17, 2008 at 10:54 am
[...] Quote of the day Published by Egor Margineanu on February 17, 2008 in Lotus Notes and SharePoint. The final conclusion is that while SharePoint can handle maybe 30% of any given apps functionality o… [...]
February 28, 2008 at 5:00 pm
The question arises, why would you want to do transactional processing with SharePoint or Notes for that matter. You probably could devise transactional type applications if the department/company were small enough or if the transaction level were low, but that’s exactly what transactional SQL Dbs were designed for.
I agree with the reporting aspect, however, SQL server has “reporting Services” (but you need VS studio to create reports) whereas Notes still needs third Party tools (although now IBM as bought Congos that may change also).
I’ve been following you trials and I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this, however it has convinced me that I need to stay with Notes for general ad hoc development.
March 12, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Sorry to hear you’re having so much trouble. I’m in the same boat that you are: after working with Domino for many years, I’m placed in charge of migrating my company from Domino to Sharepoint. I have more of a Admin background than Developer, but I have experience with both sides.
We seem to be having more luck with our efforts than you are. We’ve got a 5 server Sharepoint farm that’s been up and stable for about 4 months now. Just like you, I ran into some major problems early on, and even had to do a complete reinstall at one point. (I even got to curse myself for not documenting everything better).
We’ve begun migrating our simple Domino apps over, and currently have about 5 of them successfully moved. We’re taking the approach that whenever possible, we should use a combination of Infopath forms and Workflows to recreate our Domino applications. We’re avoiding writing custom workflows for now, so this means cherry-picking the applications where we can make the built-in workflows work.
March 27, 2008 at 11:26 am
@3 ….. please update your feelings on this when the cherry picking is over.
April 8, 2008 at 7:31 am
Excellent Blog
Sharepoint sometimes can be like a stubborn mule, sometimes you have to get along with it (on the customization side), sometimes you have to use the stick (by way of comand line -STSADM- configuration)