I Loath SharePoint, Part 2

If you go to the 'Team Documents' section of the API Team's SharePoint site (which you can't, but I know you all have excellent imaginations, so just play along) you will see a page with a bunch of different things labelled as 'Folder'. E.g:

+ Folder: Misc
+ Folder: Release 1
+ Folder: Release 2
+ Folder: Standards

and so on. Note that the "Folder:" string is added by SharePoint, not I. Clicking on the '+' expands the "folder" and shows you the documents (and "sub-folders") inside it, just as you would expect.

If you upload a new document there is a field named "Folder" which you set to determine which of these "folders" the document should go into.

So you might think it reasonable to assume that these things called "Folder", and which are displayed with a little folder icon beside them, are folders. Alas, as with most things in SharePoint, if it seems reasonable then it must be wrong. They are not folders, they are "metadata categories". That's why, if you try to use the 'Manage Content and Structure' page to display the structure of 'Team Documents' it gives you this ever-so-helpful message:

An unexpected error has occurred.
Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.
Correlation ID: 3e2d2dd4-93dd-43c5-8170-48cdbc5ea0ee

Because nothing says "this page does not support folders" quite like "Correlation ID: 3e2d2dd4-93dd-43c5-8170-48cdbc5ea0ee".

This, from the world's most successful software company? I can only shake my head.

Sizeism

I'm often amused when visitors to Canada show up on a one-week vacation expecting to "see" the entire country. If they're willing to drive for 10 hours every day then they might just be able to squeeze in a whistle-stop tour of 9 of the 10 provinces, but they'd have to give Newfoundland and the northern territories a pass.

I remember talking to a woman from Australia who remarked that the same thing happened there. Apparently another crazy idea that foreigners have is that they can just pop over to New Zealand to spend an afternoon taking in the sights there.

Oddly enough, I don't recall ever hearing the same thing about the United States. I think that may be because of the wide dissemination of American culture: everyone knows it's a big place. New York City, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. The would-be traveller gets exhausted just trying to list the places zie would have to visit to make a good fist of sampling all that the country has to offer.

For Canada I expect that most foreigners would have trouble coming up with destinations beyond Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. For Australia the list would probably be Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Canada is a big place. Second largest country in the world after Russia. (I wonder if visitors to Russia think they can take in the country in a week? Probably not. The Siberian vastness seems to have penetrated the world's collective consciousness in a way that the Canadian Prairies have not.)

Americans, to their credit, seem to be aware that Canada is big, although a disturbing number of them continue to believe that a permanent snow belt starts at the border. I guess it's the natural result of living in a large country themselves. If you're from Europe, where most of the countries are of small or middling size, it must skew your perceptions accordingly.

Mind you, the skew works both ways. I remember on a trip to Liverpool my hosts took me to see Lake Windermere, the largest lake in England. I noted, with some surprise, that you could actually see from one end of the lake to the other¹. When they asked why that was surprising I pointed out that I grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes, which is roughly the size of Wales. Even on a clear day, looking across the narrow part, with binoculars, you weren't going to see the other side. So while I wasn't expecting a sea-like body of water, it was still something of a surprise that one could see from one end of the England's largest lake to the other².

Had I given it more thought, I would have realized that if England itself can fit easily into the two largest of the Great Lakes, Superior and Michigan, then the country wasn't likely to have room for a lake of any significant size.

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¹ To be fair, there is a bend in Lake Windermere so I was really only seeing from one end to about 3/4 of the way down the lake. But at just 18km long, even if it had been straight, the other end would have been visible.

² Loch Lomond, in Scotland, is roughly five times the size of Lake Windermere and twice as long, making it the largest lake in Britain. Although a bit shorter than Loch Lomond, Northern Ireland's Lough Neagh has over five times its surface area, making it the largest lake in the United Kingdom. However, if you were unwise enough to refer to either of those places as "England" you could find yourself in a spot of bother.

EDIT: Changed "Ireland" to "Northern Ireland".