SharePoint alternative

Are you frustrated with SharePoint?

• Is SharePoint the place where your documents go to die?
• Are you having trouble sharing files securely across firewalls?
• Is your organization really collaborating and getting work done?
• What is the real total cost of a SharePoint implementation?

These are just some of the challenges that SharePoint users face every day when trying to collaborate and share documents in an easy and effective way. Project management and document sharing software such as SharePoint should help you get more work done, instead of increasing your frustrations. In addition, SharePoint's complex pricing and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) need to be taken into account when evaluating a deployment. At that point, you'll probably start wondering if there's a real alternative to SharePoint.

Which of the following frustrations is SharePoint causing you?

Frustration 1: User adoption - Did you implement SharePoint only to find your organization is not using it?

Effective online file sharing, project management and knowledge management are important success factors of any collaboration tool, but the most important is, by far, user adoption. This is where SharePoint has always fallen short.

The user experience, and therefore user adoption, is often the most underestimated component of success when deploying SharePoint.

A recent Global360 survey has shown that lack of an easy-to-use interface is one of the biggest issues when implementing SharePoint. If your users don't enjoy using it, they will keep on using other less efficient means of collaboration, such as email.

According to the Global360 survey, 78 per cent of participants agreed that SharePoint's user interface is not completely adequate.

In addition, a 2010 uSamp survey of 317 US business users revealed that 80 per cent of SharePoint users continue emailing documents back and forth, instead of using SharePoint.

Despite its new 2010 version, the user interface revamp, and now the SharePoint Online version, SharePoint's biggest problem is still adoption. It's often the first cause of failed implementations.

Ultimately, IT managers and business users want the same thing: a collaboration tool that just works…

Fig 1: SharePoint user experience from Global360 SharePoint Market Survey 2010.

Frustration 2: Total Cost of Ownership - Do you really understand SharePoint's Pricing and TCO?

Client Access Licenses? Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 license? Standard CAL? Enterprise CAL? SharePoint Server plus Enterprise and Standard CAL? WSS? MOSS FIS? FAST?… Really?

If you are not familiar with all these terms, you probably haven't had to choose a SharePoint licensing pack, which means that you have avoided a great deal of frustration and numerous phone calls with Microsoft consultants.

And this is just the licensing part, it does not take into account the other main frustration: the TCO. As Microsoft states in its Evaluation Guide to SharePoint; "Whether on-premises or hosted, deploying SharePoint Server requires the IT pro to be heavily involved."

Worse still, the software is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a Microsoft-sponsored whitepaper, software licensing only accounts for 7% of the Total Cost of Ownership for an on-premise solution. The hardware, consultancy and training accounts for a further 33% but by far the largest component is staffing at 60%.

The total cost of SharePoint can have a big impact on the deployment phase, as well as on an ongoing basis. Administrators and technical staff will be needed to address issues such as permissions, VPNs and performances.

While evaluating the cost of SharePoint, factors such as additional server licenses, initial customization, configuration, external consultants and time to go-live should also be taken into consideration.

SharePoint offers extensive functionalities, but it's not easy to use out of the box and requires considerable customization and configuration. A Global 360 survey highlights that SharePoint's out of the box experience is considered 'great' by less than a fifth of the respondents. Any customization to this initial experience will cost your organization time and money, often with external SharePoint consultants involved.

A recent study by IDC shows that for every dollar spent on Microsoft products, almost eight dollars are spent within its ecosystem of partners and system integrators. Consequently, it is not easy for customers to estimate the total cost of a deployment.

The lack of an intuitive user interface makes training and support necessary and these can quickly increase the total cost of deployment of SharePoint. Training materials and training sessions will be needed to explain even the simplest functionalities, such as task management.

It should also be noted that SharePoint runs only on the Microsoft stack. This prevents organizations from leveraging existing investments in non-Microsoft skills and technologies while creating a long-term vendor lock-in with Microsoft.

Fig 2: The hidden costs of SharePoint.

Frustration 3: Collaboration across the firewall - How do you share documents securely with your clients and partners?

In the modern global networked service economy, working across organizational boundaries is imperative to maintaining a competitive advantage. Every organization has to collaborate with suppliers, vendors, partners and customers in order to achieve higher levels of competitiveness. This leads to the emergence of cross organizational business processes that need to be supported by collaboration technologies. Collaboration tools should therefore not be limited to internal communications, but should also allow seamless communications with external stakeholders.

As a McKinsey report on enterprise software showed, external collaboration is just as important as internal collaboration when it comes to achieving higher operating margins and gaining market share.

With on-premise deployments of SharePoint, your business users cannot use SharePoint for document sharing outside the company firewall. They'll have to rely on emails or FTP, causing security issues and governance problems.

Another typical frustration occurs when two companies, or the HQ of a company and its branch, both using SharePoint, want to work on the same projects or share the same knowledgebase. Most likely, since the two SharePoint installations will belong to two different networks, it won't be possible for their users to communicate and work together.

If you are not on the same network, it's harder to collaborate.

Enter Huddle

Whether you are using or considering using SharePoint in your organization, Huddle is the best alternative for collaboration, content and project management.