i am drowning
there is no sign of land
you are coming down with me
hand in unlovable hand
Okay, maybe that’s a little dire – I’m not planning on taking you with me, and I don’t feel your hands are all that unlovable – I’m just SO FRUSTRATED I NEED TO SCREAM (and/or sing Mountain Goats songs until I’m hoarse and sobbing).
I’m building an intranet for my company, using Sharepoint 2010. With the exception of the two-day course I took on Sharepoint 2010 and my ability to write words on the internet, I have absolutely no experience or skill or talent with intranet building in any way. I am so over my head I feel like I’m drowning and therefore ruining food court tacos for millions across the land. I’ve spent the last two days wading through XML, CSS and Javascript; three things I am wholly unprepared to wade in. All I want to do is change a fucking font size, but is it an easy thing to do? Of course not. To change the font size of a pre-built SP item, you need to somehow unpack the .THMX file, extract the CSS that dictates font sizes, rewrite it, pack it all back up, and trick the system into thinking it’s the original file. WHAT THE HELL, MICROSOFT? NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO READ PAGE AFTER PAGE OF CONTENT IN 8PT VERDANA!
I am frustrated and annoyed that I can’t do this. I hate feeling completely lost; knowing that I am woefully lacking in the knowledge needed to do the things I want to do. I feel dumb and angsty, and my toes are cold. I AM A SAD KIMLI, AND I HATE SHAREPOINT SO HARD I COULD JUST POOP.
In other news, we paid our deposit: we’re going to Cuba in May. Perhaps I will defect – I bet they don’t have Sharepoint down there, and I could learn to like rum.
delicious juice dot com 
You have my sympathy. Sharepoint sucks the wang.
We too have an intranet in Sharepoint. I curse it out daily.
I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. I’ve never seen a Sharepoint “site” that wasn’t a complete disaster. Are there some out there? There must be right?
Cuba is great. Where are you going there?
working in IT for 10 years I’ve seen a lot of sharepoint. It is in my opinion probably one of the worst products that exists, and business people love it (or love the idea of it, or something). The only good thing I can say is the interface has improved over the years I guess. I used to convert clients from sharepoint to wiki platforms for certain tasks, which would overjoy users to tears. Now apparently you can put wikis *in* sharepoint.
Anyway the big thing is that (like the comment above) I have never seen Sharepoint implemented properly the first time. That’s whether it was built by a novice or a team of senior server admins. It always ends up broken, hideous, and needs to be bandaged, scrapped, re-done, etc. Many times I’ve seen expensive Sharepoint Expert consultants brought in, who can get things mostly working, for about $50,000.
Anyway – good luck :)
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