pipka.org

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.