I suspect sharepoint is the platform version of excel & VBA. You & I might hate it, but it gets powerful capabilities into the hands of regular people.

sharepoint is probably many non-engineer's very first exposure to actual version control with checkouts, checkins, version history, and merge.

Sharepoint has version control? I thought it´s mostly a poorly functioning Dropbox copy.

This comment is absolutely hilarious to me, because the main selling point for SharePoint (for the longest time) was that you could version control Microsoft Office documents. Then intranets happened, someone wanted to build a Turing machine with it, and now it's the monstrosity we know now.

What makes it a nightmare? Can you share a few issues you've run into?

The JS API is total crap. One has to use it to develop anything that gets a bit more complex, but MS chose to ignore things that exists in the ES standard (like normal iterators, wtf) for quite some time to preserve backwards-compatibility with IE. This make neither debugging nor any further exposure to the API any fun.

SP, like any standard platform (think i.e. SAP) invites the systems integrators to customize the crap out of it, which tends to impact the bad performance even more.

I see. Thanks for sharing your experience!

In my experience, Sharepoint is stupidly slow, and it feels like it's trying to be everything.

Like...I don't need it to notify me that I have new e-mail. I already have either Outlook or an Outlook tab running.

Sharepoint is a shining example of feature creep run wild.

I've never seen search work properly (where "properly" = 90+% of searches return desired document in first 2 results)

I see. We have some internal facing stuff that our IT has done using sharepoint. Its not pretty/modern by any stretch, but it works just fine. Was curious what the world looks like from the other side.

Isn't the search issue more of a indexing engine problem though? Can you plug in other engines?

I still have no idea what Sharepoint even is. The way I’ve always seen it used is a way to host sites with file hosting tied to them. It feels like an over engineered CMS.

Some parts of it are some sort of list based CMS with poor naming