Evolution of our Mindsets
We have gone through a fairly quick evolution on our opinion of SharePoint since I started this blog. I wanted to break it down, because it seems that people’s attitude towards SharePoint can sometimes flag exactly how well they know the product.
Phase 1: “SharePoint can do anything. Let’s migrate everything.” These are the folks who have read the marketing, but never worked with the product. They just don’t have a realistic sense of what makes it difficult.
Phase 2: “SharePoint sucks. It is a horribly immature product that cannot do much of anything, and any real complexity takes custom .NET coding.” Noobs. People who haven’t yet learned the subtleties of how to piece things together in SharePoint, and what kind of advanceed customizations can be done with SharePoint Designer. (And yes, I was here when I started this blog.)
Phase 3: “Look at all of these cool WebParts I’ve written to help us get the most from SharePoint” Sadly, most consultants I see are here. They say they are SharePoint experts, but really, they are .NET experts who front-end their code through SharePoint. Their first reaction to anything complex is to fall back into custom coding. But they can do more with SharePoint than most corporate folks, so there are a lot of these folks out there building SharePoint environments.
Phase 4: “SharePoint can do a lot more than people think, if they know how to work it.” This is the first level of expertise that I’d actually hire to work on a project. They understand how to do all the basics, and also can work the XML/XSLT to tweak the UI, they know how to create complex sets of workflows, lists, and libraries, then pull them all together into a slick interface. They know how and when to integrate InfoPath, and how to throw in C# code-behinds instead of giving us custom DLLs and webparts to deploy.
Phase 5: “SharePoint is just a tool. I have expertise with it and can make it do quite a bit, but let’s evaluate it alongside other technology options and pick the best solution.” Here we go. This is where we all want to end up — knowing the strengths and weaknesses of multiple platforms, and matching solutions with business needs.
Of course, no one fits neatly into one of these categories. My team has elements of phases 3, 4, and 5 in their attitudes, but none of us have actually built so much experience that we’d claim experitse in the platform yet.
The reason this really matters to me is mostly for vendor relationships. If you are hiring a consultant, or even an in-house employee, I’d be very wary about anyone whose attitudes aren’t at level 4 or 5. When looking at everything we’ve done in this first year, I’m concerned that we could have done things better, and have built some poor precedents for how we architect apps. We can certainly change the patterns we’ve fallen into, but that actually takes leadership skillz, and hey, we’re tech folk. 
