I've read Paul Culmsee's articles with great interest on Project Failure and will be helping him continue his series in the next few days on Development Failures. Joel Olsen, SharePoint God, also has found keen interest in it and has written some of his own experiences with it.

It's interesting to see Joel write externally from Microsoft and it really does show a more open, less reserved approach to his writing. He really does support what I wrote the other day on Organisational Responsibility and also on the vast array of SharePoint capabilities around the 6 pillars.

Joel's posts first comment states, that it's great to be aware of this but what is the solution? I think the best approach from both Paul and Joel's comments and my own experience is to set the expectations of the Business properly and not let them get sucked into Microsoft sales talk.
The problem with reading the copious amounts of information on the Microsoft web site on SharePoint is that it does make SharePoint out to be easy and can be done by Business Users. That's all good and well, but in reality this is not the truth from my experience. Business Users always want that little bit more out of what's there OOTB. Joel makes a great point about risk and giving everyone SharePoint Designer and I'd go further in giving all Business Users Owner rights on sites. I think there is a fine line between Control and Chaos.

Joel is right in saying that you really do need a SharePoint expert on board and letting a guy with AD experience run an entire SharePoint platform is not wise. As discussed in my last article, AD is a small part of the SharePoint iceberg.

SharePoint is a complicated beast and getting it setup correctly at the start as Joel has reiterated can prevent a lot of problems. The organisation I currently work for has rebuilt their entire Test environment and is in the process of planning rebuilding the Production because of it's unstable nature and undocumented changes from the OOTB configuration. I cannot state more on the whole Governance side of SharePoint and having controlled Development and Test/UAT environments to ensure those Service Level Agreements (SLA). Developers just simply shouldn't be allowed to deploy things manually in each environment when there are mechanics available to automatically deploy Solutions packages and have control and reduce the variables and risks associated with human error and manual deployments.