Microsoft SharePoint falls short in Web content management, analyst firm says

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 does a poor job managing Web content, leading to extraneous JavaScript, difficulties implementing complex forms of navigation, and problems when companies use Web content that needs to be translated into multiple languages, an analyst firm called CMS Watch says in a new report that evaluates content management products.

While SharePoint is great for internal document sharing, some customers are finding it difficult to use the product for Web publishing, says Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch.

“There’s an expectation in the marketplace that that same simple plug-and-play will also be the case for Web publishing,” Byrne says. “What we’re seeing is well-meaning companies and well-meaning customers trying to use MOSS 2007 for their public-facing Web sites and running into all sorts of problems. … You need an experienced developer and you have to do a lot of configuration.”

Byrne likens his organization to Consumer Reports, and says it maintains a vendor-neutral stance by refusing to take money from vendors. Released this week, “The Web CMS Report” evaluates 30 vendors of content management systems based on product evaluations and interviews with customers.

A Microsoft SharePoint group product manager calls some of CMS Watch’s criticisms inaccurate and misleading. The analyst firm, for example, says “MOSS natively generates non-standard HTML code with extraneous JavaScript and table-based layouts, which is problematic for enterprises wanting to employ standards-based design and code conventions. Licensees must pro-actively strip this extra code from their own websites.”

Arpan Shah, the Microsoft product manager, says the extra JavaScript is good for mixing Web content and collaboration. Not all of it is necessary for a pure publishing site, he says, but for those cases Microsoft provides an option for creating a “minimal master page” that allows Web site designers to create custom page layouts.

“You don’t need all that JavaScript,” he says. “You can start from that minimal base and create your own page layout.”

CMS Watch also criticizes MOSS 2007 for its navigation structure, which is based on browsing directories composed of documents, Byrne says. But Web sites often need more complex forms of navigation, and “to do that you have to turn off the basic navigation controls of SharePoint and get a developer to go into the innards and replace it,” Byrne says. “Like many things, there’s not a lot of guidance from Microsoft on how to do that.”

Shah says SharePoint’s out-of-the-box version provides navigation based on a Web site’s hierarchy, or directory, and allows developers to make changes such as adding links and reordering them without writing any code. If they want to make more complex changes, they would have to write their own code, he says.

“We provide a really good out-of-the-box solution, but there’s flexibility for people to build their own controls,” he says.

Byrne also criticizes SharePoint for having a “simplistic object mode” that makes it difficult to work in global settings where content must be translated, such as an intranet used by a company based in multiple countries.