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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

As if a plain vanilla SharePoint installation wasn't bad enough, where I work we have documents spread across: SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Gmail for Business, Google Drive, Google Apps, shared directories and more.

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I'm wondering how many HN readers are looking at this comment and are thinking to themselves "That's a great problem for a startup to tackle".

Not such a great problem. If the services you were trying to manage are natural forces, then it makes sense to try and conquer them. However, these services will all actively try to stop your startup from succeeding by pulling legal tricks and other methods to block your access to customer's accounts.

I don't recommend you try this unless you are a lawyer already who can somehow turn this startup into a legal battle, and make profit that way. Good luck...

It is currently being tackled in various industries by specialized document platforms. Specialized because taking vanilla Sharepoint or Documentum and making it compliant with very specific rules and regulations is a costly nightmare.

We are tackling Life Sciences as we speak.

Sharepoint is a steaming pile of crap and yet somehow it manages to pull in an ungodly amount of revenue. The big problem in that space isn't featureset, it's sales. People buy and use sharepoint because it's backed by MS. In order to beat out MS in that market you don't just need to be incrementally better you either need a product which is so vastly better it leaves sharepoint in the dust or you need something that has killer features which drive adoption and maybe obsoletes sharepoint as a side effect.

Agreed but to be honest there is nothing else that has that good integration that you can shoehorn your entire business process into.

As for startups taking this on, there isn't a chance in hell. The problem is too big to solve quickly enough to get market traction. SharePoint is big and complicated for a real reason.

> In order to beat out MS in that market you don't just need to be incrementally better you either need a product which is so vastly better it leaves sharepoint in the dust

Actually, all you need is a better salesperson. Sharepoint is sold by salespeople to people who have no idea of what they are buying.

http://xkcd.com/927/

Same here. We also have clients who have started to use dropbox for file sharing with us. This is giving the legal department heartburn...

Because of files exposed to outside parties?

How is this any different than people emailing files around (which legal departments still do themselves quite a bit)?

But Outlook lets you mark an email as "do not forward". That makes it safe, right?

Yes if you have the relevant group policy rules and filters in exchange.

Documents in many places complicates things. For example, if you have to go through discovery, all of a sudden you have to make sure you find things on every single service you've stored them. That's (part of) legal's job, and the number of different services you're using is a multiplier on a lot of things.

What gp described just seems inefficient in general.

Exactly, and documents emailed around exist in many different places, in many different mail boxes and on many different machines.

Although corporate emails all typically exist on an exchange server. Better in email than 100 different Dropbox accounts.

I won't question the (proper) assumption that enterprises typically use Exchange, but I will say that this is why solutions like Dropbox exist and are adopted in enterprises: because it's easier to get the information where it needs to be than what "enterprise" solutions offer.

It's more that the greater number of channels the more difficult it is to harmonize corporate policies across all those channels. For example, communicating via email entails data retention for a period of time as a matter of law these days (SOX, etc.) What happens when people start using a shared dropbox instance to send, say, todo lists, short messages, power point slides, tech specs, etc. to each other? What's the intersection with the types of communication which are sufficiently "email like" to trigger a concern in terms of data retention? And then that brings up a whole host of technical issues and so forth.

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