Microsoft’s latest foray into things that might possibly have a small chance of not sucking is their new MOSS offering – Sharepoint as a service. Now I know what you’re thinking: has That Software Guy lost his mind? Actually using a low quality, buggy, insecure Microsoft service?
Relax. I’m just doing it because I needed a laugh. And sure enough, I got one.
The marketing ploy is, “use MOSS because you won’t have to provision your own capacity to run Sharepoint – we’ll do it for you.” But then when it comes to actually trialling the service, you get a pretty blue dialog that says,
* The number of available trial accounts has temporarily reached its limit.
ROTFL!! Boy, that’s sure a confidence builder.
OK, so why would someone who wasn’t clueless use a closed-source content management system? Why would you choose to be at the mercy of a single vendor with such a lousy delivery record? And has Microsoft finally solved problems that everyone else figured out decades ago, such as managing multiple simultaneous updates to a single resource? (The Sharepoint 2003 answer was “last one in wins with no notification of impending overwrite.” Nice!)
