We had an interesting twitter conversation yesterday about features we as SharePoint consultants wanted in the next version of SharePoint. We had lots of interesting discussions on the future of Yammer, Oslo, Power BI, etc.
However, there are a number of issues with SharePoint that as it matures have still never been addressed and in some cases are getting worse as we move to the cloud, integrate Yammer, etc.
This is my list of BASIC issues that continue to stump my customers consistently…
- Fix scalability so that SharePoint can truly handle massive volumes of documents (e.g. hundreds of millions of documents). The basics are there but things like limitations on bulk updating, view limits, searching limits, etc. start impacting this without a lot of advanced configuration.
- Version control and Content Types are not ADVANCED FEATURE! Turn these on by default, move the settings up to the main menu and have a more guided experience for both of them.
- Remove the dependency on the URL as a unique identifier for a resource. It’s simply too fragile as site moves around, links are made from external systems, etc.
- Provide a built in 404 location service that automatically maps old links to new ones, old sites to new locations, etc. in an intelligent manner. Have a linking service that allows me to do bulk update URL locations, remap items, and bulk move content around that doesn’t break existing links.
- Content Type and other Taxonomy concepts should be centrally governable. For example, if I have design level permissions, I can take my company prescribed document library template and content types and simply remove the content types, add my own columns, etc. I can easily break all the hard work the IM team has done to establish appropriate taxonomy. Make this easier to publish out and govern.
- Fix navigation so that it is global and integrates all site collections into a single navigation structure.
- Remove the distinction between “Publishing Site” and “Collaboration Site” – any site should allow for branding, creating pages, etc. and all the features in collaboration sites should work well with a branded experience.Remove all the artificial default boundaries caused by Site Collections such as content types not being global, navigation not spanning site collections, features being Site Collection scoped, etc. Fix mass uploading and bulk updating of SharePoint document library items.
This isn’t an exhaustive list but in many cases these are issues that have been around for many versions of SharePoint and should have been fixed in 2010 or 2013…before we launch a bunch of new fancy features, these are basic ones that impact adoption of the platform with many of our clients.
