EDITOR’S NOTE ON A MISSION TO MAKE SHAREPOINT BEARABLE

ALTERNATIVES TO SHAREPOINT ABOUND

IS SHAREPOINT ONLINE THE RIGHT FIT?

When SharePoint Doesn’t Cut ItIt’s no secret: Lots of users don’t like working in SharePoint. They’d better start looking around for solutions—because the problems aren’t just going to disappear.

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EDITOR’S

NOTE

A Sore Point

It’s perplexing how applications that companies tolerate—and often loathe—can still achieve widespread adoption.

That has been the fate of Microsoft Share-Point for much of its life. While Microsoft can claim about two-thirds of the collaboration or document management market, Jeffrey Mann, an analyst at Gartner, noted that SharePoint “does not excel in any particular area when compared with best-of-breed, single-purpose products.”

In this series of articles, we explore why SharePoint doesn’t always meet enterprise goals. We also look at some of the alterna-tives and how to evaluate the cloud-based SharePoint roadmap, also known as SharePoint Online.

To start, we dig into why users revolt against SharePoint. As consumerization of IT becomes more prevalent, SharePoint is becoming an albatross for users to manage and maintain.

Next, expert Brien Posey explores the enter-prise content management and collaboration market for alternatives to SharePoint. He highlights several technologies that share functionality with SharePoint but can be less cumbersome to manage, less costly or have more-advanced features.

Part of the brouhaha over SharePoint con-cerns its online version. Most surveys indi-cate that fewer than 20% of companies have migrated to SharePoint Online. In some cases, it may be because migration is difficult or because of concerns about data security in general. But in others, there’s real concern about preparing for the migration to the cloud. So, to close, consultant Jonathan Bordoli com-pares on-premises and online versions of SharePoint. n

Lauren HorwitzExecutive Editor, SearchContentManagement

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IMPLEMENTATION

On a Mission to Make SharePoint Bearable

When workers get up in the morning, they are rarely enthused about navigating to a Microsoft SharePoint portal to manage docu-ments. They might need a second cup of cof-fee before they tag files for easy retrieval later. Navigating SharePoint can be a labyrinthine experience, even for IT-savvy users.

But Microsoft’s lock on business productiv-ity applications extends to SharePoint. Many enterprises make their peace with SharePoint, despite the fact that it “does not excel in any particular area when compared with best-of-breed, single-purpose products,” as Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner analyst, noted at the 2013 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

If this seems like a contradictory picture of SharePoint’s role in the enterprise content management (ECM) market, consider these numbers. According to AIIM’s report “Share-Point Watch 2013: Clouding the Issues,” 57% of 600-plus respondents said they use SharePoint

as their primary ECM system, and nearly a third said it’s their only ECM application. But according to business management consul-tancy Protiviti Inc.’s 2014 IT Priorities Survey, nearly half of all organizations rely on IT to deploy, configure and launch SharePoint, as well as train business users. It’s a usability gap of sorts: SharePoint is well-entrenched among companies’ workflows but often a cumbersome way to work.

“I love SharePoint’s calendar feature. But when you get into working in documents con-stantly, SharePoint’s cumbersome compared with other solutions,” said Dustin Bolander, vice president of technology at Technology Pointe Inc., a consultancy in Austin, Texas. Technology Pointe implements SharePoint, but Bolander said that for traditional ECM func-tions, he prefers other tools, such as the up-and-comer M-Files.

The on-premises and cloud-based M-Files

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doesn’t require much administrative babysit-ting to categorize, upload and retrieve files. “With SharePoint, you still have to manually organize it,” Bolander said. “With M-Files, I don’t have to build the structure or metadata. You just tag it, and it knows where to go for all the different people and ways to view it.”

STANCHING SHAREPOINT SPRAWL

Until recently, SharePoint was the default management application at Cliffs Natural Resources, based in Cleveland. Cliffs used the application for its intranet and internal docu-ments, as well as for its externally facing web-sites. The global company, which mines iron ore and coal, now has a project under way to migrate many of its files from SharePoint to Hyland Software’s OnBase ECM system. The company is running up against storage limits as well as SharePoint governance issues.

“Our SharePoint was at a breaking point,”

said Bob Weisert, senior OnBase administrator at Cliffs. “Our main Web app is 350 gig, which exceeds any SQL Server best practices. We’re trying to get to the point where we understand what’s in there and what belongs where.”

But it’s a catch-22 of sorts. While Cliffs is trying to determine what is in these files and who “owns” them, it has to wade through years of SharePoint sprawl and bring order to chaos.

“[SharePoint] became a dumping ground,” said Patricia Kackley, former manager of enter-prise content at Cliffs. “There is no governance, no controls.”

Companies using SharePoint often have doc-uments residing in far-flung, hard-to-identify locations, with little governance or ownership of those files. According to a 2014 study of more than 100 organizations by software com-pany Docurated, 60% of respondents said that content was growing at a rate of at least 100% a year, contributing to SharePoint sprawl.

OnBase presents the opportunity to improve

Companies using SharePoint often have documents in far-flung, hard-to-iden tify locations, and there is little governance of those files.

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ALTERNATIVES

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IMPLEMENTATION

some work processes without disrupting work-ers’ current practices. Weisert will spend the next year purging SharePoint files, moving oth-ers to OnBase and setting up APIs that link to files that reside in OnBase. As a result, the 3,000 active users accustomed to working in SharePoint can access files through a familiar API, Weisert said.

“Printing work orders can be more easily cat-egorized and managed in OnBase,” Kackley said, “and workers can search for invoices based on various criteria, including purchase order num-ber, invoice number and so on.” But workers can also access files in SharePoint—if that’s the interface they’re accustomed to.

“We try to build an interface that users can live in. Here, people live in SharePoint,” Kackley added. “So we give them portals or views and try to make that business solution seamless to their everyday behavior.”

Cliffs is on SharePoint 2010, so it also needs to migrate to SharePoint 2013. But it won’t do

so until it sorts out file governance. Weisert said it’s problematic to have users so accus-tomed to SharePoint, because they have enough knowledge to perpetuate the sprawl but don’t have the governance training to rein it in.

“One of the biggest challenges is taking the keys away from the castle that users have had all these years,” Weisert said.

THE STICKING POINT

While other companies use SharePoint, they acknowledge it involves heavy lifting to keep it well-maintained. If users don’t know how to apply appropriate metadata to tag and orga-nize content, SharePoint can easily become the quagmire that Cliffs is now contending with.

Sam Fields, vice president of operations at Netrepid, a provider of co-location, infra-structure and application hosting services based in Harrisburg, Pa., said that his company uses SharePoint because of its core document

If users don’t know how to correctly tag and orga nize content, SharePoint can easily become a quagmire like the one Cliffs is stuck in.

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management and collaboration capabilities.“It excels at bringing all your content into

one place, where everyone is viewing the most updated version at any given time,” he said. The centralization of files, an audit trail and col-laborative capabilities are table stakes for ECM applications like SharePoint.

But Fields said that features like search and metadata categorization complicate usability. “I haven’t always gotten the most power out of [SharePoint search],” Fields said. “Search works, but you need to tag it with metadata correctly.”

Ultimately, SharePoint isn’t a “set it and

forget it” application, which is why users can buck it or adopt shadow systems instead. SharePoint needs constant care and feeding. Thorough tagging and correct categorization require user training—and also understand-ing how the organization’s business works in order to help map the SharePoint architecture correctly.

Certain tasks require intimate knowledge of the business and can’t be outsourced. “This is one of the challenges you run into when [consultants] introduce SharePoint into an organization,” Fields said. “We can’t categorize for you.” —Lauren Horwitz

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EVALUATION

Alternatives to SharePoint Abound

Over the past several years, Microsoft’s SharePoint software has arguably become the gold standard for team collaboration and con-tent management. Even so, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that SharePoint can be expen-sive to license and difficult to support. In addi-tion, users can find SharePoint unintuitive, even with training.

Fortunately, SharePoint is not the only option for organizations that require Share-Point-like functionality. Several other prod-ucts offer features similar to SharePoint’s. While the list is hardly exhaustive—there are many content management systems on the market. Let’s explore technologies that have commonalities with SharePoint and may be a better fit for organizations in terms of cost or management.

Alfresco. Probably the best-known Share-Point alternative is Alfresco Software. Like

SharePoint, Alfresco is a Web-based tool for enterprise content management (including document management), Web content manage-ment, records management and social content management and collaboration.

Alfresco also includes some more advanced features and capabilities that make the usabil-ity experience similar to that of SharePoint. For example, it is possible to “like” content and fol-low its author. Alfresco has a workflow engine and a content analysis engine, and it supports auto-tagging of documents and integration with various file-sharing apps.

Alfresco has structured its pricing so that a product’s cost corresponds to the size of the organization and the way the product is used. A community-supported starter subscription sells for $7,150 per year, while a quad-CPU enterprise subscription sells for $75,399 per year. The company also offers cloud-based subscriptions starting at $129 per month.

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ALTERNATIVES

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WHEN SHAREPOINT DOESN’T CUT IT8

EVALUATION

Huddle. Another well-known SharePoint alter-native is Huddle. The software allows for file sync and share, collaboration through secure workspaces, project management, workflows—the list goes on. The software also integrates with Microsoft Office and social networks. Huddle is marketed as a SharePoint alterna-tive, and it’s equipped to migrate data out of SharePoint.

Huddle uses a subscription-based pricing model. The Workgroup subscription starts at 25 users and costs $20 per user per month. The Enterprise subscription starts at 100 users and costs $40 per user per month.

It is worth noting that Huddle’s price is on par with that of SharePoint. An Office 365 Enterprise E3 subscription costs $20 per user per month and includes SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Yammer and Microsoft Office.

Hewlett-Packard TeamSite. Some organizations choose to use SharePoint alternatives because they simply don’t need all of SharePoint’s fea-tures. For example, an organization might need Web content management capabilities but not other SharePoint features. HP TeamSite, which

is part of the Autonomy suite of products, may be a good choice.

TeamSite is designed to be a comprehensive system for Web content management. It helps with everything from site design and layout to

content authoring and multichannel delivery. The software also can perform targeted con-tent delivery so that site content is displayed to visitors based on their geographic location, behavior and more.

TeamSite can also help with metadata man-agement—to assign tags to content to enable categorization and retrieval—which can be a grueling task to perform manually. The soft-ware can enforce site taxonomies and SEO poli-cies. It even supports the dynamic generation of content tags.

HP TeamSite can perform tar- geted con tent delivery so that site content is displayed to visitors based on their geographic location, behavior and more.

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EVALUATION

WordPress. Organizations that are looking for a free Web content management system should consider WordPress. WordPress is marketed as a free, open source Web application for creating blogs. But entire business sites can be built on top of WordPress.

At its core, WordPress is a graphical design tool. Admins can use a WYSIWYG style edi-tor to create pages within the site or to upload new content on an as-needed basis. While WordPress is a decent Web content manage-ment system on its own, the thing that makes WordPress worthwhile is its add-ons. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of open source add-ons that are freely available for WordPress. Of course, an organization can always opt to make its own customizations rather than rely-ing on open source code.

Google Drive. One of SharePoint’s best fea-tures is its document library. Organizations that need a similar feature but don’t want the

ample investment in SharePoint should check out Google Drive, Google’s consumer-grade cloud storage offering. It works like other con-sumer cloud storage services such as OneDrive or Dropbox.

Like SharePoint’s document libraries, Google Drive works with a wide variety of file types, and files that have been uploaded can be shared with others. Google also gives you the ability to choose who can comment on, view or edit files.

Oracle WebCenter Sites. Like SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter Sites allows users to build portals for sharing enterprise content. Web-Center Sites strongly emphasizes interaction with mobile devices, but the product’s best feature might be its document imaging capa-bilities. WebCenter Sites can capture document images and then perform automated recogni-tion, classification and routing of those images for files like business forms, faxes and raw documents.

Like SharePoint’s document libraries, Google Drive works with a wide variety of file types, and uploaded files can be shared with others.

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EVALUATION

OpenText Enterprise Content Management. OpenText is a tool for applying governance policies to documents in a way that maintains compliance and security while also managing information lifecycles. Like SharePoint, OpenText also features an e-discovery engine that legal departments can use to gather content.

Another key feature of OpenText is its archiving engine. Archiving policies work even in multi-tenant environments, and the soft-ware supports the archiving of external content

such as Google Mail and Office 365 mail.OpenText also provides other SharePoint-

like capabilities, such as the ability to share documents externally, build workflows and cre-ate content-specific dashboards.

Given users’ concerns about SharePoint’s ease of use, it’s worth exploring ECM software that is similar but may offer fewer management headaches or lower cost. In some cases, you can take a freeware version of the software for a test drive before you sign on the dotted line. —Brien Posey

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MIGRATION

Is SharePoint Online the Right Fit?

For some organizations, SharePoint Online is the answer to problems like rising data center infrastructure costs, the time sink of management and patching, and a lack of IT expertise. SharePoint in the cloud can provide simpler, more cost-effective enterprise collab-oration and content management capabilities.

But for companies with complex require-ments, it might not be the right fit. While Microsoft continues to add functionality, many useful on-premises features are missing from SharePoint Online. And unlike SharePoint on-premises, SharePoint Online is not easily customizable. This might not be an issue for companies with straightforward needs and a small IT staff, but lack of customization could be a real obstacle in some cases. Cloud security also remains a major concern for companies dealing with sensitive information or strict regulations.

How should companies decide whether

to keep SharePoint on-premises or choose another approach? First, let’s define the various deployment options for SharePoint 2013, which extend beyond just on-premises and online.

■n SharePoint on-premises: The installed ver-sion of SharePoint 2013 in an organization’s data center on either physical or virtualized infrastructure.

■n SharePoint Online: The SharePoint-as-a-ser-vice capability offered by Microsoft within its Office 365 cloud environment.

■n SharePoint on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The installed version of SharePoint in a third party’s virtualized data center. This could also be SharePoint running in Micro-soft Azure or the Amazon Web Services cloud.

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MIGRATION

■n Hybrid-cloud SharePoint: A combination of on-premises and cloud deployment.

Each of these options is based on SharePoint 2013 software, but there are some important nuances.

SharePoint on-premises is a full software installation. An organization can choose to deploy all or a limited number of SharePoint’s wider-defined capabilities to its user com-munity and will need to deploy or choose not to deploy service packs over time to address issues with the software. With installed soft-ware, the capabilities and features may become an issue once a new release is expected; there may be feature enhancements or feature depre-ciation to consider.

SharePoint Online is a service coming from Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud. It is a standard service offering constrained by the capabilities Microsoft chooses to offer at any point in time. The capabilities and features of the product are known at the outset, but Microsoft can roll out

feature enhancements and depreciations at any time and the organization has no choice but to comply with them.

SharePoint on IaaS is similar to SharePoint on-premises, but the organization installs the SharePoint software on external public or private infrastructure cloud services. Infrastructure typically means virtualized serv-ers running SQL databases, the SharePoint software and Web servers, and Active Directory.

When Microsoft launched Office 365 in April 2011, many debates focused on what Office 365 lacked. Some organizations needed to con-sider only email requirements (Outlook and Exchange), so it was a simpler decision. Other companies with more comprehensive needs had a complex decision to make. Clearly, the cloud and Office 365 are here to stay. In many ways, we have been here before with decisions related to mainframes, bureau services, thin clients, client servers and now back to bureau services. —Jonathan Bordoli

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

JONATHAN BORDOLI is a senior manager in Hitachi Con-sulting’s Microsoft Platform Practice. He has more than 25 years of experience defining, designing and managing content, collaboration and process improvement technolo-gies. Email him at jonathan.bordoli@pobox.com.

LAUREN HORWITZ is an executive editor in the Business Applications and Architecture group at TechTarget. Horwitz joined the group after four-plus years in the Data Center and Virtualization group and two years at CIO Decisions magazine, where she served as the managing editor and a contributing writer. Email her at lhorwitz@techtarget.com or follow her on Twitter: @lhorwitz.

BRIEN M. POSEY is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience and expertise in SharePoint ad-ministration. He has published thousands of articles and has written or contributed to dozens of IT books. Before becoming a freelance writer, Posey was CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. Email him at brien@brienposey.com.

When SharePoint Doesn’t Cut It is a SearchContentManagement.com e-publication.

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