I was speaking with a fellow co-worker today about bloated software because I’m working to take a SharePoint site and move it to Umbraco. I took a SharePoint HTML page that was over 600 lines of code and was able to drop it to about 100 lines of code in Umbraco, just by pulling out all the junk and creating valid markup.
I think SharePoint has some of the worst markup I’ve ever seen in my life. It would be a decent solution for document management and intranet sites, but I can think of a ton of better ways to spend the $20,000 they charge for an external publishing license.
With intranet sites you don’t really have to worry as much about browser compatability, or whether someone may decide to visit your site from a cell phone. You also aren’t as concerned about bandwidth because you are on a faster internal network and search engine optimization isn’t necessary… at least it shouldn’t be.
This all changes for external sites. Microsoft has done a great marketing job of diverting attention from SharePoint’s glaring shortcomings.
“Just look at all these built-in features out of the box!”
Sure, the features are there, but then you have to go and rewrite everything to get it to work right. Umbraco may not have all the bells and whistles of SharePoint, but at least I’m rewarded with a clean and valid website instead of spending a ton of money for something that I’m happy just to get halfway functional.
People are often so awed by features that they lose site of benefits, which should be the real reason to buy software. Microsoft always tries to be everything to everyone, and often they end up with a bloated mess. I hope they learn their lesson and start to rebuild some of their stuff. The Expression suite and Windows 7 are good steps in that direction, but the jury is still out.