SharePoint Magazine
September 4, 2008

Is SharePoint value for money?



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Written by: Arno Nel

Do you think there is ROI in SharePoint? Up for a debate? Check out the poll on SharePoint Magazine or lock into heated debate through the comments on this post. Im personally keen to hear what the public has to say when the tough question is asked. What are your thoughts? Let the conversation begin……….

SharePoint Value for Money Poll

SharePoint Value for Money Poll

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under SharePoint Magazine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
About the Author

Arno Nel

I’m a web technologist, first and foremost. I choose the best technology for a specific purpose. In my experience, for intranets, SharePoint fits that bill. I am not an evangelist. Why would I be? My opinions are honest and unbiased. I currently work for Dimension Data in the United Kingdom as a Lead Consultant in our Microsoft Solutions Business Solutions Division with a strong focus on SharePoint.

Contact the author | Other Posts by Arno Nel (10) | Author's Website

Viewing 14 Comments

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    The question you posed and the answers you received do not address your bias as you describe in your bio.

    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?
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    • v
    Hi Robert, you do make a good point, but i disagree.
    When deciding on a technology to fit a purpose, you take the current environment, the culture of the company, the other technologies, the budget etc into account when making a technology decision. For me, as an Architect, its almost always an easy discussion to have when it comes to SharePoint because most of the organisations ive worked with have had Enterprise Agreements with Microsoft, and have a culture of using and understanding Office products.

    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"
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    Guess your own answer is spot on, it just depends.. I believe however that (right now) SharePoint Server and WSS are definitly not aimed at SMB or even IT savy one man/woman companies.

    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.
    • ^
    • v
    I think it depends on what you (or your organization) want to do in a intranet (or with SharePoint in general).
    As a consultant, one of my customer (a great international company) has a sharepoint 2003 intranet completely customized, also the navigation between areas is customized.
    I think they would respond "No" to this poll...because had a lot of costs in developers and consulants.

    But if SharePoint (as out-of-the-box) fit your requirement, the answer will be a "Yes"...
    • ^
    • v
    Philisophically for the record, I am pretty close to the way Arno views the world myself. (ie just because I am a SharePoint consultant there have been many occasions where I have recommended people choose something else - and I also use WordPress proudly :-).

    Liking SharePoint is one thing - determining if is the right fit - and therefore a suitable ROI is another.

    I previously wrote a 5 article series attempting to educate IT and engineer/develop type thinkers to have more of an understanding of how CFO's and senior management tend to approach ROI considerations. The first 2 articles explain discount cash-flow which is one of the most basic ROI tools. The next 3 are specific scenarios.

    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/17/lea...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/25/lea...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/28/lea...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/08/lea...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/09/lea...

    ROI is definitely *supposed* to be quanfitable. the methodology for quantifying is the trick and in the series above, I wrote on the most common and basic method. By quantifiable, I do not mean platform fanboys playing pissing-in-the-wind on some low level technical consideration either. (Slashdot demonstrates pretty effectively that some nerds have a tendency to see the world in very black and white terms. When looking at ROI they look at technical features and do not do a great job to relate it back to the issues that the rest of the population cares about.)

    (Blatant plug alert) The "thinking sharepoint" series is another series that looks at the sorts of considerations that are often overlooked. The maturity of the organisation as a whole is a greater impact on SharePoint ROI than the technology alone.

    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/06/14/thi...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/06/26/thi...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/07/23/thi...
    http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/07/29/thi...

    Anyway, I am also strongly in the "it depends" category. To answer "Yes" makes no sense to me at all and is potentially risky.

    cheers

    Paul
    • ^
    • v
    I would have to agree with Arno hands down. I love SharePoint, but I also host my blog on wordpress. I will say though, that for small businesses hosted sharepoint is a good alternative. My friends owns a great company here in my town that hosts sharepoint, exchange, and crm. They are amp.net.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm new to Sharepoint (about 3 months) and have been in ASP.NET for about 3 years now. It's a different world for sure and am finding the learning curve steep.

    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.
    • ^
    • v
    hi
    i am also using MOSS form past 1 years onwords...previously i 'v worked on dotnetnuke....
    I am very comfirtable to work with MOSS
    • ^
    • v
    HI Arno, I totally agree with your statement, Sharepoint is really cool for intranets, and document management in the enterprise, and obviously Wordpress is just the best for internet usage. A wordpress equavelent for Sharepoint would be nice though ;-)
    • ^
    • v
    it will take some time for that kind of equavelent ..
    better yet, i guess its better this way .. at least from my end
    • ^
    • v
    Here is my take.
    My one line backgroud is that I have worked in Interwoven, LiveLink and SP 2003 and MOSS 2007.

    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.
    • ^
    • v
    Here is my take.
    My one line backgroud is that I have worked in Interwoven, LiveLink and SP 2003 and MOSS 2007.

    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.
    • ^
    • v
    It is very difficult to fairly compare SharePoint with the other products mentioned in this thread. I would tend to agree with most of the posts here that there are better solutions in areas such as ECM or blogs but this is because SharePoint is not a point solution. MOSS 2007 is a platform solution that combines ECM, collaboration, BI, WCM and search. To compare it with a point solution is fairly meaningless.
    If as an organisation you want a platform that does all of these things relatively well and allows you to integrate them together easily then go for SharePoint. If you want a best of breed ECM etc. then buy something else but expect to have to spend a significant amount of money integrating it with all your other best of breed point solutions.
    • ^
    • v
    More CIO's are convinced that SharePoint is good value for money and SharePoint, in turn, is becoming a serious money maker for Microsoft. SharePoint is an excellent tool for business collaboration and communication especially for organizations that are already on the Microsoft platform and use exchange for email.
 

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