SharePoint vs. ??

30 Aug 2010 - 1:40am
2 years ago
3 replies
717 reads
Allison McKeever
2009

Hi, 

I'm currently doing an audit of 3rd party tools available that have similar functionality to SharePoint i.e. secure login, calendar integration, contact lists, document libraries, version control, tasks/issues lists, etc... Does anyone have any 3rd party tools they can recommend? If so, can you give me a brief description of why you like the tool? Is it intuitive, can it integrate into the other programs you already use, is it robust yet simple? 

If you currently use SharePoint, how does your organization manage control for internal and external parties? 

I'm also interested in common complaints people hear in regards to using SharePoint. 

Any information is helpful. Thank you in advance for you contribution. 

Regards,

Allison 

Comments

30 Aug 2010 - 8:05am
Fredrik Matheson
2005

Have you had a look at:

There's an incredible number of vendors in this space, so you'll save a lot of time by purchasing a report written by folks who have thoroughly tested the tools on offer.
You will of course have thought of it, but make sure you do enough research on the tools and your colleagues' needs. Also, most of these tools are updated quite often (SharePoint is the exception, with new releases every three years), so make sure you have the capacity to update and tweak the tools as often as you deem necessary.


30 Aug 2010 - 9:17am
thomasyung
2010

Hi Allison, I am also doing a very similar project at my workplace. We are evaluating SharePoint vs many of the open source alternatives.  I've amassed a lot of research in two months.  Is your organization already using SharePoint?  It's very important to know your baseline, and what you are really trying to accomplish.  

If you're interested, my findings in a nutshell are:

 

  • If your existing IT infrastructure is "all" Microsoft (especially if your web server is IIS), then it's a no brainer. SharePoint is your best option to tie in all things Microsoft.
  • If your existing web infrastructure is Apache or LAMP based and you want to compliment that with SharePoint, then you are going to have lots of issues to deal with.  SharePoint in a nutshell is a web server with many services built on top of it. .NET programming stack is the only way to interface with SharePoint directly. Otherwise, you need a separate web services layer on top of it to talk to other systems.  This adds more complexity if you need to interface with non-SharePoint systems.  From my research, it is not uncommon to hire more staff in order to manage this complexity.

 

30 Aug 2010 - 9:49am
meenalc
2009

Hi,

While working on online storage services, I came across Box.net and they had a full on campaign against how it is easy to use Box rather than sharepoint. Maybe you can check on that service. 

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