i'm concerned, though, with licensing fees from microsoft. while sharepoint is obviously the superior collaborative software for businesses, its serious web 2.0 deficiencies and marraige to the microsoft office suite put its long term success into an expensive question: in the long term, is it worth sticking with sharepoint or would it save a business money to jump the microsoft ship now and invest in more rapidly-developing open-source technology?

sure, a jump would incur a temporal loss in productivity; integrating non-microsoft technology and working with a 2.0 learning gap are serious issues. but the long-term money saved by eliminating licensing fees for each employee's office suite and immensely better social media integration (a gold-mine for business if planned and managed properly) could be much more worth it.

thoughts?

I just hope I won'tt do too much SharePoint in the future…

So I'm also with the it depends but tending toward the no.

I am currently on my 7th SharePoint project (an internet facing portal with extranet and intranet)
check it out

https://www.wsaa.asn.au/
note you can't see the members but this is essentially MySpace, Facebook for the Australian urban water industry.

Credit goes here to OBS whom have done the intial work (look and feel(nav), FBA and Topology)

Agree it is excellent ROI if it fits your requirements and customisation is reasonable, heavy customisation as with SAP, Siebel etc is expensive possibly at some point more expensive than building a custom solution.

If you can mix some cusomisation and config with OOB say 80/20 rule and meet your requirement you will kick a goal. SharePoint can allow you to develop what might be a custom .NET app that would take you 3 months in 6 weeks. If it can look enough like what SP will give you out of the Box particularly looks and navigation. A lot of projects start rewriting the nav and putting their own in, state management, web part infrastructure if this is happening it is possibly a sign that SP is/was the wrong technology from the outset. Work smarter not harder plan, design, architect, pilot.

The other catch is deployment and upgrading, I have a preference for custom site defintions and solution packages, if you choose the other option it can become incredibly painful to get your SP project from one environment to the next which is important in large environment(s) (organisations) and upgrading it can become very very nasty.

To get benefit out of SP in terms of its deployment infrastructure you need to be in it for the long term and you need to need what it offers again it is great for very large environments(s) (organsiations) (lots of web servers to deploy across and manage). If you have a need to upgrade or move your app b/w environments you will need a solution package with a custom site definition by the time you add the avg 3-4 weeks amount of time you need for this you need to look carefully at weather if you are not in it for the long hall SP is a good idea. If you can do it in farm you will be ahead, but can this be sustained, more than likely you are creating a mess for me to fix thank you $$$ . You consulting firms know who you are.

There is a huge learning curve with SP for .NET people if they are more .NET than SP they will likely commit a number of costly errors, this can turn what should be a 500k project into a $1 million project. No offence to these folks but I went through that learning curve myself and even though I argued against certain things they happened any way on some projects. Of course if the ratio of SP experienced peopke to .NET is disproportionate it is a tough ask.

I think LiveLink wins hands down (no wonder they are in the gartner leader quadrant for several years for ECM).

SP 2003 and MOSS 2007:
the less said the better about 2003. so i will jump to 2007.

1. MOSS enterprise edition a gimmick. I can as well build a .net interface to SAP/SIEBEL/etc systems and talk with sharepoint to storing content from my application. BDC does not give anything new except to have a placeholder in enterprise edition.

2. Same with excel services. It is a good tool, but I am suppose we can do the same thing in .net.

3. Same with advanced info path forms. I can as well as build a .net app and talk to sharepoint.

4. So enterprise edition does not give anything new except to make money for our beloved Mr.Softee.

5. Scalability a huge issue. Also even if your data reaches 1TB, you have to put in place a strong dba, a strong administrator and a strong architect just to keep things going. These guys cost easily close to 100 per hour each!!!!

6. If you are looking at 5TB to 20TB (a fairly medium, i wont say big because big means greater than 50TB), then you are seeing a mess of front end's and application servers.

7. If you touch anything then it is a .net work and that means a dedicated sharepoint developer.

8. storing all content within the db is shocking. Imagine maintaining 2TB database for even basic document managment storage!!!!

9. one good thing is UI in 2007 is good. But most content/doc mgmt system's user interface has dramatically improved in their latest versions.

LiveLink:
1. a massively scalable system.

2. no need to even have an admin to be present once you get the infrastructure and modules in place.

3. zero dba needed. zero architect needed after inital work.

4. very very very very low maintenance baby.

5. can scale massively to 25Tb with just 2 front end web servers. content stored externally means zero database worries.

6. neat UI in their latest version a huge advantage

7. no standard/enterprise edition gimmicks

8. strong support from even basic OpenText support. cheap becomes cheaper.

9. licenses can be negotiated as low as $100 per user license.

10. can be easily exposed to extranet's/internet via their servlet option.

11. many many more.

If I were to recommend, I will do LiveLink over anything. I have not worked in Documentum and so cannot comment on it. I want to comment on Interwoven but wont do that as it does not even come upto comparison levels. Check Gartner's quadrant for this also.

My current company is in the early stages of its first Sharepoint deployment and Sharepoint has given us a good head start as we have been able to impress quickly. While the initial capabilities are good, digging deeper will take a while to get a handle on.

In my last company, I elected to run with DotNetNuke instead as it's simpler to develop against and doesn't require the same expertise to manage that Sharepoint does.

What I do want to add though is this, wordpress may suit your needs perfectly (and it may well be the best blogging platform around) but in an environment with 1200 potential blogs where TCO is important (and where management wants it's engineers focussing on their jobs not on installing wordpress) the SharePoint blog template or the My Site functionality wins hands down.

But if SharePoint (as out-of-the-box) fit your requirement, the answer will be a “Yes”…

Is SharePoint the BEST product for Intranets? Is it the BEST document management product? Is it the Best Enterprise Content Management or Content Management tool? Can anyone answer yes to any of the above questions? How do you define best? Does best mean it has the most features? Does it mean it is the cheapest? Does it mean it integrates into other LOB applications the easiest? Does it mean it has the lowest Change Management when deploying? Or is it just the BEST because you have only ever used Microsoft products?

So. I guess i need to answer the question about why I use Wordpress instead of SharePoint. Its simple. Wordpress has more features and is regarded as the best Blog publishing platform, bar none. Its Cheaper to host on my limited South African budget because its open source. So for me, it was the best tool i knew of to host a magazine style website. To answer your question then. For me, as a single person trying to host a website and pay for it in South African Rands, SharePoint wasnt the right call. For my company, Dimension Data, which has 11000 employees and an EA with Microsoft, it was an easy decision for me to use SharePoint for both our Intranet as well as our Internet sites.

Hence my answer on the poll was………”it depends”

The reason you do not eat your own dog food is not clear in your bio – nor does it have anything to do with your poll.

logic always trumps undefendable positions. You may have framed your question: Is there a value in SP beyond intranets?