Sharepoint is scary. People that use it quite like it and are blissfully unaware of the sticky technology and licensing trap they’ve allowed into their environments. It provides some useful functions that could be found in many applications or bundled applications, however the trap is that once you deploy it, Microsoft have you pretty much under their thumb. You have to use their technologies, you have to use their office suite, their operating system, their data formats. It is very hard to move away from.
There are loads of articles written about this. I’ve put only a few interesting ones below:
- The Future of Lock-in, Microsoft’s two faces of SharePoint & While you were sleeping (The Sharepoint trojan horse) – Matt Asay
- Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software – Wall Street Journal
So Sharepoint is something that needs careful consideration. What are the alternatives? I don’t profess to be an expert in this space, however I’ve put a list of useful applications below that give you loads of great collaborative functionality:
- Alfresco – Enterprise Content Management
- Clearspace by Jive (not Open Source, but looks interesting)
- O3Spaces – document centric collaboration
- Metadot – Open Source portal server
Plus of course all the other applications that are great for collaboration including WIKIs, chat applications and loads more.
Have you had a look at Novell Teaming? (http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-teaming-conferencing-boosts-worker-and-team-productivity)
Michael Cote’ at Redmonk pointed me at Clearspace a while back … DOES look interesting, although I am still chasing some “inherited” licenses for Quickr (definitely NOT FOSS!) …
ive had the displeasure of using it and themeing it.
Its a pain and very time consuming in contrast to a CMS like drupal or plone, but the guy who decided to install it pretty much wets his pants on ms anything, despite having zero experience with any thing else (yep the office is moving to vista)
Don’t forget Plone, it is good Sharepoint alternative with support for full text indexing of documents and extensible to integrate with other systems via opens standards. It also supports accessibility standards, which is a key requirement for public websites, that I believe is not supported out of the box by Sharepoint.
I have no problem in pushing any single application that can match Sharepoint, the problem is there isn’t one. There are many who address the common areas like the basic web site etc for example a workflow engine, a search and find engine, an excel computation engine, document management system, collaboration portal, and the list goes on. The problem is once you have a taste it is very compelling to get more (bit like a drug) but in a large company it addresses many areas of needs and requirements. The free version that comes with Windows only offers one slice of the 8 slices available. It is a powerful solution that far outweighs its competitors. you are also able to license it in smaller pieces so you don’t needto have it all.
Also consider http://www.HyperOffice.com, http://www.1and1.com and http://www.apptix.com | See http://www.sharepointalternative.com for details and analysis.
Great link http://www.sharepointalternative.com/sharepoint-alternative-comparison
Maybe 03Spaces could also be interesting or Alfresco. A comparison between 03Spaces and Sharepoint can be found here:
http://sharepointalternative.org