Holy shite, Sharepoint is already cancer. Now it's cancer with Copilot.

(And yes I'm fully aware of the Pterry quote 'Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind'. This is what imagining the eldritch horror of Sharepoint and Copilot linking their foul tentacles and writhing around dripping acid slime everywhere has done to me)

How about using less crappy file systems?

Never mind.

PS: if I change my paths to something really short, can I trade the gained valuable extra path length?

NTFS is a decent filesystem, and I feel I should come to its defence.

Sure, it's not the new CoW hotness. But that doesn't make it a bad filesystem, surely?

NTFS has outlasted every one of its peers except for XFS and variants of FAT - which is terrible, but just won't bloody die because it's so simple that even ChatGPT can understand it.

Comparing it with XFS, it comes out favourably. Both are decent filesystems, fast, reliable, with a good feature set. Not identical, so most people are going to lean towards one or the other, but they're closer than you'd think. I'd compare NTFS to FAT, but that's like comparing a modern car to throwing yourself off a cliff - both can get you to a destination, but one of them has safety issues.

The main issues with NTFS are what's above it. Windows' IFS stack means that NTFS often has lots of cruft intercepting file operations before it's even handling them; the various Windows file protection systems, an antivirus shim, OneDrive, and more. If you create a second non-OS partition and format it NTFS, you'll find it performs very well.

Microsoft have tried to replace it with ReFS, and it hasn't really taken. I built a fileserver two years ago and gave thought to using ReFS, but then realised that I could be forced by my Corporate Overlords to switch AV or backup solutions at the drop of a hat. Did I really want to risk incompatibilities with ReFS? Especially when NTFS was dong just fine, thank you. So NTFS it was.

For over 30 years NTFS has been one of the safest, most reliable and performant filesystems in the industry. It should get more respect for that.

My recollection from back when I worked for SharePoint specialists was that the problem was less about the actual filesystem and more that Sharepoint loves to create very verbose paths that end up going over the maximum permitted length for a URL.

Oh yeah, there's definitely potential for an issue on SharePoint's side.

Technically NTFS supports paths up to ~32Kb in size. You have to enable a registry entry on Windows to use that in applications, and it will break a lot of older apps that assume a 260 character buffer for path names.

For us sysadmins it's not unusual to see a fileserver with deep paths beyond the usual 260 limit because the share itself was created in a subdirectory on the disk. Also Apple clients or Linux clients care not for your pathetic legacy Windows 260 character limit, and will happily spaff files that go way past that limit. And NTFS will happily store them. Windows Explorer, however, will lose its tiny little mind trying to handle them unless you use various tricks.

I think that the URI limit for OneDrive is reputed to be around 400 characters, but it's the kind of thing that can vary depending on the action being requested.

Frankly, as most people have "C:\Users\John.Smith\OneDrive - Company Name\" placed before any file that they try to upload, they're much more likely to hit the 260 character limit issue than the OneDrive issue. Hence they blame the filesystem. Which is a shame, as OneDrive/SharePoint are much more deserving of ire than NTFS is...

I agree that NTFS is a good file system, though it would be even better if Microsoft documented it properly, and I don't think it's the issue here.

One of the problems with the unholy marriage of Sharepoint and OneDrive is the mismatch between file systems (OneDrive) and URLs (Sharepoint). On a reasonably sized "team" site you can quickly run into problems when synching to a machine because of path names that the OneDrive client can't manage.

I agree, and I partly covered that in another reply. But that was about NTFS and file lengths, and in replying to you I'd like to look at the other side...

Microsoft made a mistake when they tried to ape filenames in their URIs.

Take a look at Google Drive - it doesn't care what you called your file. Be it Doc, Sheet, or a PDF you uploaded, it gets a link that's just an alphanumerical string. Drive is effectively an Object Store, but the interface is good enough that nobody ever notices.

That gives Google a huge amount of flexibility.

OneDrive came out of Microsoft's Groove acquisition, and at that time Microsoft were still very much in their Monopolist Phase. So it was very natural that they'd try to attempt tight integration with the OS, and go with aping a filesystem on a webserver instead of using an object store. Personally I think that with the benefit of hindsight it was the wrong decision. It's too limiting on both ends of the solution - client and server.

They should have gone for an object store on the server, and a client that does local retrieval/sync/caching/searching of those objects. The client should also have an API so that local apps can work with it natively if they want to. But the danger there is that Microsoft would have to open up that API at some point, plus building this is a lot more engineering work for them. So they went for the fast option, despite it being complex, fragile and limiting.

Still, hindsight, eh?

OneDrive is SharePoint and SharePoint is OneDrive.

* A OneDrive is just a SharePoint site that Microsoft link to a user object. When the user object disappears Microsoft automatically delete the SharePoint site. (Usually - MS have lots of bugs in this area)

* The OneDrive client is just a local binary that makes a SharePoint site appear part of the local filesystem. (With syncing. etc)

I didn't think it possible, but they've found a way to make sharepoint even worse by the sound of it.

... SharePoint as a product which works consistently?

Consistently? Attempts to work would be an improvement!

The terminal part of the lifecycle of product or application just after it either works (mythical), mostly works and is moderately useful (extremely rare), sort of works but fairly useless, is transferred from the soon to be redundant developer team to the coloured crayon department to be "reimagined."

At least after the coloured crayon treatment the product quality and product consistency is uniform — totally useless and completely dysfunctional POS.

Your comment confuses me.

It implies that SharePoint has worked.

Do we have evidence for that assertion?

And I'm sure it'll finally add support for check in/out through OneDrive and remove the Internet Explorer-only option to open a SharePoint site as a shared network drive on Windows. Only been waiting for those feature for a decade, surely it's done now?!

As it is, I don't go a week without the main sharepoint site we use as a read-only document repository running into sync issues, mostly due to file path lengths.

Additional fun can ensue when generating large video files it attempts to upload unprompted, or in one case several thousand logging files all with the maximum filename length possible. It all uploaded successfully, and then started giving errors when we tried to remove them in Windows Explorer. Even the Sharepoint web portal kept erroring out if you tried to delete all the files at once - I think in the end we found we could delete them ten at a time and resorted to sitting there for a few hours doing just that.

SharePoint is not a replacement for a file server/share. It's a document store. It's really good at Word/Excel/Powerpoint type files and really bad at log files, binary blobs, etc.

Great, now my co-workers and make and distribute AI slop even easier at work. What what we all asked for.

As soon as I saw the headline I thought "Let me guess, they're going to vomit Copilot all over it". I guess I'm not wrong.

Where I work, they've recently deployed Copilot licenses to the entire estate and it's an absolute pain in the arse. AI Icons and overlays that follow you around everywhere (and cannot be disabled), repeated popups and nag screens pleading and begging me to use and chat with it, a literal swarm of Copilot icons spread far and wide over every possible surface. It's so intrusive it's obtrusive and I absolutely despise it.

It's like trying to work whilst having a 2 year old toddler tugging at your sleeve and saying "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! I want to help! Daddy I want to help! Let me help!". Not what you want whilst trying to concentrate. The AI bubble cannot pop fast enough for my liking.

Urgh...

And here I thought they (ab)used Atlassian's crushed stock price to buy them and we'd get a FrankenCMS made up of Sharepoint and Confuence.

Sorry! Sorry! I didn't mean cause such screams of horror and anguish in the readership!

The idea is terrible, but they might redeem it with a good name like "Shompulence" or "Careploince."

I'm actually looking for a decent DMS that doesn't cost the Earth, and Sharepoint definitely is NOT - it's a horrific abomination whose main job appears to be generating stacks of orphaned data.

" The new release will be available as a preview in March, before Microsoft starts a targeted release forced march the following month "

Ah, the good old days when you could decide whether or not you wanted to install something . . .

I'm a volunteer technical assessor for a national ISO accreditation authority. One of the assessed said after they had difficulty finding something that I asked for: "Sharepoint is good if you know where the document is" - often they didn't, and finding it was an exercise in time-wasting. I'm hoping that the problem was inadequate training or design, but it has come up several times.

I’m not confident that these changes will improve this…

The best thing is, if you search for it and it turns up in the search result, SharePoint gives it a temporary path and still hides the real one. Top enshittification marks!

Tip: open the doc in your desktop app and do File > Save as... This enables you to identify the current path. Boo! Hiss! We'll haver to AI-enshittify the desktop apps next. Or pull them entirely. H'mm, decisions, decisions.

A new phenomenon sweeps the global workplace - Artificial Enshittification.