thanks for taking your time and offering your help. I would love to get in touch with you and work out, what is actually wrong in my current post and what changes Sharepoint will see in the 2010 version and beyond. I will reach out to you via email soon and hope for some more of your time to be able to publish a much more balanced view.

Thanks for dropping by

Martin Seibert

I’m available on twitter (@spwiki) and through email : kevin.davis@microsoft.com if any of the readers here have questions.

Having used SharePoint as document management tool and non sharepoint wiki’s (media wiki, flexwiki and moinmoin) I cannot comment on the Wiki extentions – but I know that wiki’s do not handle the versioning of office documents. SharePoint is a reasonable document management system designed to incorporate Office documents for structured data. Wiki’s are designed to allow the quick and easy capture of unstructured data. Until recently SharePoint did not offer Wiki functionality.

The Wiki extensions to SharePoint do not stop SharePoint being a document management tool. If you expect the doc management properties to do Wiki tasks then you are setting yourself up to fail.

I would like to see a comparison of the Wiki components of SharePoint against a standard Wiki as a proper comparison. I expect they would be no where near as mature in functionality, but at least it would be a meaningful comparison.

I think that a lot of criticism here and also yours is confused as general Sharepoint critique. I like Sharepoint as a solution and it has its place in a lot of companies. But if you are searching for an enterprise wiki, you should rather choose something like Confluence. That is the better alternative, that you were requesting.

On training issues you are right. Every software needs training. The question is how much and for what. A wiki is generally very successful, because the first edits are quite straight forward. A lot of wiki users are drawn into wikis without any training. What I hear from our customers, they experience quite the opposite for Sharepoint at their workplace.

If you want real measures for usability ask yourself: How intensively do you use your Wiki in your Sharepoint instance? How many edits do you have? How many employees use the wiki already?

I would bet: the average Sharepoint instance will look very poor on these KPIs.

Second, when you weight in and consider the benefits of having a SharePoint within your environment, then nothing in this article matters.

It’s extremely interesting to note, that whenever people use SharePoint as a comparison gauge, they always fail to mention the alternatives that are supposedly better!!!

However you just stated that this isn’t the case and people have chosen to just upload office documents. Feature poor or rich, your information and statements are wrong. I would suggest doing more research before making a article under the guise of an expert when you have only spent 90mins with a product.

Also, which was pointed out to me, you state “Moreover, de facto only Internet Explorer can be used when working with SharePoint.” And then back it up with “Here is a screenshot of MS SharePoint with a Firefox browser”, making your statement that it only works with IE completely false.

Under the term “Usability” You criticise SharePoint for needed business user training. However if I put Confluence in front of a user, I would sure bet that they need training also! Compared to SharePoint, it would be a lot more as SharePoint draws on existing Office Skills which people already have. My point here is any product needs training.

It seems you have got some very separate and different functionality confused and all rolled it into one as there are several flaws with your article. Very little material relates to the Wiki, but rather other functions and features.

The same customers use confluence completely different, as it is more intuitive and powerful from the wiki-perspective.

Do you really doubt that?

A Wiki in SharePoint does not require office. As it supports in-browser editing and is the recommended approach. Nothing to do with office.

As for opening and closing a document before editing, how would one edit a document before opening it?

Did I get you wrong?

It seems like a cheap stabe, as Mike said on a product they used for lass than a day.

I will be happy to incorporate your corrections and the correct terms. Please see my disclaimer on this issue here also:
http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/03/comparing_sharepoint_to_confluence_wiki.html#comment-204653

“That said, I also have to admit and to disclose, that I have been criticized for it just as well as I received praise for it (see here in the German post: http://blog.seibert-media.net/2008/11/arbeitstechniken/ms-sharepoint-als-wiki-wenig-funktionen-nicht-kompatibel/). Everybody should know, that a lot of things in the article, do not stem from my own expierience but from an open space session on WikiSym 2008 in Portugal, that I led. There were a lot of people, that were talking out of frustration about Microsoft Sharepoint as a collaboration and enterprise wiki solution and I picked up their complaints in my blog post.
Then I was passed a MOSS 2007 account, to test MS Sharepoint myself. I only did in an empty “space” and for not more than 90 minutes. That is, why some of my criticism might be wrong or shallow.
But the message remains stable: “Do not use Sharepoint as an enterprise wiki!”
And yes, it has been a reaction to clients that are pushing for Microsoft Sharepoint, but wanting an enterprise wiki. Hear my words: You are better of, when you keep your Sharepoint instance and enhance it with Confluence and the sharepoint connector. There are lots of good consultants to help you with that out there.
I hope, that my contents will be picked up, analyzed and discussed to clear out errors in my argumentation. I am looking forward to joining this discussion.
I envision, that eventually, Microsoft will come up with a reasonable solution. But I do not expect that anytime soon. ”

I posted a comment there and feel honored that our post was picked up.