I’m really sorry to hear about that. Good luck!

For an internal site using MS defaults it might be ok, but I have been tasked with producing a custom forward-facing website, which someone higher up was told was easy with Publishing sites. I’m stuck with either some really nasty css hacking to make their tables-everything work – which I’m starting to think isn’t even going to be possible, or rewriting everything down to the basic menu components myself. This is miles behind even the most basic CMS.

Unfortunately we’ve already paid the incredible licensing fees so I’m stuck trying to make pile of s*it work, while full well knowing I could have had something that works better in half the time on a free product. I take some pride in the css/html/general code I produce so the ugly output I’m being forced to settle with is just breaking my heart.

It all depends on your business case and the requirements and as an expert you should do an educated choice whether it suits your requirements or not.

Unfortunately the choice has almost always already been made and is irreversible once anyone with the slightest knowledge of front-end issues like web standards and accessibility is involved.

I’ve never understood the argument that internal facing websites and applications would not need to validate or be compatible with anything other than the currently installed browser…. It would seem even more important to me that, such sites would be compatible, accessible, etc, since their lifespan usually is soo much longer than that of their public facing brethren.

It baffles me that after so many years of the web standards movement, that large companies like Computer Associates, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc. are still putting out such shitty products. The only reason they can sell these products, is that people buying them have little technical knowledge (or have limited access to good advisors), and that the people selling them to clients, apparently care more about immediate business and not so much about repeat business.

This might work for awhile, until the client gets an advisor that can show far better success with competing products and vendors.

At a client I am currently working with, I see Subversion moving in the shadows, threatening CA Harvest as source control platform for the entire enterprise. The company has spent 3 years integrating CA Harvest, and it’s still a ball and chain, and hated by most of the developers in the entire organisation. One project has gone rogue, and are using SVN … they’re enjoying tremendous success, and upper management have taken notice… so, it’ll be interesting to watch that battle.

For those that offer services and products to clients, let me offer these thoughts:
When you offer services and products that stimulate your clients business and help them solve their problems, your clients will recognize this, and they do come back for more.

When you offer substandard products and services to your clients, you can bet your grandmother that, your client will be looking at all available options, before going into a longterm commitment with substandard products and your services again.

In these situation, the only way to guarantee repeat business, is to force the clients by having vendor lock-in. Unless you’re actually Computer Associates, Microsoft, IBM, etc., this doesn’t apply to you.

If you offer services based on these products, your client might think that the reason that their intranet/portal/website/whatever is such crap, is because you’re crap.

So, to summarize … if you sell your client a substandard products, you’re going to be working your ass off, trying to make the product suck less, to ensure repeat business … on every project, for every client.

It is indeed a mockery …

bruce,

Great, thanks for the link (goes to put on some heavy metal… ).

Waldek,

I get what you’re saying, but I think Emil and Jens make very good points. If you want collaboration, or just a public web site, why accept something which has to be rewritten in a major way?

Isn’t the whole point of frameworks to make things easier, more flexible and decreasing development time?

And while standard are still very important, in my opinion such envrionments are way less restrictive than public sites on the Internet.

Why are internal environments less important when it comes to standards and accessibility? There are still about 10% of users that have some kind of disabilities.

And why should companies and others who buys MOSS have to spend extra dollars or time to make it validate and accessible? Why couldn’t MS just make it work out of the box when it possible?

And as you said, this only applies to public “publishing sites”, not sites users can contribute to, then you are stuck with the defaults. I’m building a highly collaborative intranet…

http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=7290

(Your music taste is still crap, by the way.)