At the risk of massive downvotes, I have to admit that a small part of me wants this so that maybe corporations stop using Sharepoint as soon as possible.
Seriously, I haven't used it since 2017, but every time I used it then it was the worst part of my day. I used to have a shirt that said SHarepoIT Happens that I would wear to work, and it seemed like the one thing I could get my coworkers agree on was that Sharepoint is terrible and we'd rather use anything else.
Each M365 Teams Team creates an M365 Group which creates a SharePoint site and Exchange mailbox. Teams channel files are stored in that SharePoint site. Teams channel messages are stored in the Exchange mailbox.
Private files dropped in Teams are stored in OneDrive (rebranded SharePoint). Private Teams messages are stored in the sender and recipients’ Exchange mailboxes.
M365 is SharePoint and Exchange. EVERYTHING is built on top.
EDIT: changed ‘individual’ to ‘sender and recipients’
Throwaway account so keep this comment separate from my main account.
I used to work within the Office group. The way that data is organized in Exchange is mind-boggling -- and not in a good way, IMO. Its design is from decades ago, and trying to understand how to find something really takes a lot of experience. Without going into any gruesome details of how it works, I'll just say that it is a HUGE hurdle to being productive for day-to-day work.
Similarly, I'm not surprised that there's some kooky way that the Teams folks shoehorned their data into the existing Exchange system -- they probably have no other way to operate at that scale without taking years in writing their own database system. (I can't imagine that using SQL Server to do this would be viable, either, given what they want to do and the capabilities already built on top of Exchange.)
> The way that data is organized in Exchange is mind-boggling -- and not in a good way, IMO. Its design is from decades ago, and trying to understand how to find something really takes a lot of experience
I assume you're talking about MAPI, which owes some of its baroque nature to X.400. It definitely comes from another time. It always struck me as over-engineered.
On the other hand, it has also been ridiculously successful.
To be fair exchange works quite well for mail and calendar, it syncs very fast, is easy to set up and the cloud version is easy to administer (i never had to admin an on-prem exchange but ive heard its not fun).
Using this infra for teams makes sense since it already works well. As one poster said, its probably via some hidden folder.
I wonder what they did with skype, did they actually integrate any of it into teams or just dump it entirely?
On-prem Exchange is usually fine. Migration is a pain, but for a mid-size org you can mostly just install it and use it. If you have multiple servers distributed globally and database availability groups and such, yeah, it gets to be its own thing, but that's because at that point you're huge and you're going to feel the pain no matter what platform you run.
Teams was built from Skype. The fundamental infra for communication (chat, video call) was pulled out of Skype as a separate component and integrated into both. Skype the client is completely sunset, but a part of its back-end will continue to be used.
Teams came from Skype. Skype Lync was just a client (so far as I know). Don't take my word for it though, I was not there during the transition, this is just my understanding from talking to the ones that were.
I know it's popular to dump on Microsoft and there are some valid reasons, this is not one of them.
There are so many companies and businesses that rely on offline data, or silo'd data than will be tied through their AD LDAP account permission, M365, teams included, is such a better option than hand rolling all of them and praying you configured every service correctly.
I don't think this is nearly as crazy as you may think at first glance
Imagine if it was just a hidden (special) folder in an Exchange mailbox.
Voila, you already have a well-known and widely implemented and tested message syncing solution both for content and status (read/unread)
I assume Windows Phone worked the same way with its text message backup. When you'd set up a new phone it would take a while for your Microsoft account to finish syncing during which new messages would trickle into the Messaging app in real time. In fact if your old phone was still on WiFi new messages would show up on both. Still more advanced 15(?!) years ago than my Android today
When you dig it up, it is totally crazy and the total shit that we could expect.
Nothing works really well nowadays with exchange (classic, new, web, ...) or Teams.
It is a complex layer based on sharepoint, that was not designed for that, because OneDrive is so bad that they have absolutely no way to manage a proper sharing of files between multiple persons, and so even less between teams and orgs.
I the nice things like that, if someone gives you access to their Teams but you don't have a "storage" license on their domain, you will be able to exchange messages but a lot of things will not work without explicit clear error.
And especially sending or receiving a file, image or anything in a chat conversation.
The whole Microsoft 365 environment is a mess. The web interface of SharePoint is super slow and buggy.
Why do I have a useless "General" folder in the root of my SharePoint documents, which I can't delete? I don't even have access to Teams, because I'm using the Teams-less M365 subscription for EU users.
Every day I think more and more that I should just switch provider for my small company.
At some point Microsoft tried to sell some automatic DRM system based on SharePoint to some company that I worked for.
The sales pitch was that they could upload documents to SharePoint and when people downloaded the documents SharePoint would automatically apply DRM so the documents could only be opened by that person on authorised machines for a specified number of days.
Well, it turned out depending on how you logged in (using the same account, just different login forms) on the SharePoint server it would either give you the files with DRM applied - or the completely unrestricted files.
We got some senior Microsoft consultant working directly for Microsoft to look at it but in the end they were just as confused as us.
As a mid size company that does work with government agencies, it’s near impossible to use anything ‘better’ solution. Cybersecurity requirements are getting so onerous that Sharepoint is too commercially feasible of an option to use anything else for a shared file store between organizations.
The fact that Sharepoint sucks* doesn’t matter… because anything else is seen as a risk.
* folders with lots of files are hard to scroll through because each page is lazy loaded, the automation functions are buggy, logins between different M365 tenants breaks and is not correctable by a normal site admin, human readable URL paths aren’t standard, search is shit, tables/filters are buggy, the new interface hides a bunch of the permissions logic, some things like permission groups need to be managed via outlook, etc etc. I’m sure a bunch of my gripes are technically fixable, but these aren’t things that should need a web search in order to use/fix.
It’s not cybersecurity. It’s legal, trust me. For large corporations, eDiscovery is huge. Failing eDiscovery can cost a company millions. Having a bunch of different data sources makes it impossible, so companies stick with M365 as corporate policy and call it a day.
My company has SharePoint and another internal site for documents/notes (think about Notion/Quip/Confluence). The other site works quite well, and most developers write all their notes/docs on it. But some people just insist on uploading Word documents to SharePoint. So now everybody else has to use SharePoint as well, plus search twice whenever they need to find something.
My boss spent over a year trying to get me to setup Sharepoint. About 6 months into this, I finally looked into it and what it provided and said no. Eventually he hired a second tech and he set it up "in an afternoon." Good for him. Nobody ever used it. He also stole my high speed USB drive.
Clearly Sharepoint is being used. Otherwise, this would not be a news story. So if every single Sharepoint user switched to another piece of software, it would be more than nobody using it.
I think you missed the joke here, being that Sharepoint is installed in many of orgs, but never used after installation.
I have worked at an org that did the same. We already had Confluence. Somebody decided we needed Sharepoint. We licensed and installed it. Six months later we migrated the handful of documents and files and decommissioned it.
probably so. every corp I've worked for that had Sharepoint used it religiously. that is a whopping 3 different companies, but > 1 anecdotal experience. to be fair though, 2 of the 3 companies used it because the same person was at both companies and was responsible for using it at both companies during their tenure.
And sharepoint in large organisations I have been at recently is now using oauth which breaks Microsoft's own sharepoint client API. That whole software is one massive waste of time and buget.
Unlike Slack and Mattermost. Teams was designed by layers of middle managers at big corporate. Teams is literally everything wrong with big corporate in one package, being shoved by morons on small companies. Overall it's crippling the American economy.
Sorry to disappoint you, but Sharepoint isn't going to die.
This is actually a great day for Microsoft. People will come to their cloud solutions in troves after this and everyone will be happy. Maybe not everyone, but Microsoft for sure.
The only reason to get downvotes is nonsense of prefacing the post with the 'worry'. Sharepoint would be far from a first choice under normal circumstances (e.g. not bundled with excel and friends)
Seriously, I haven't used it since 2017, but every time I used it then it was the worst part of my day. I used to have a shirt that said SHarepoIT Happens that I would wear to work, and it seemed like the one thing I could get my coworkers agree on was that Sharepoint is terrible and we'd rather use anything else.