Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Office Live and SharePoint

At this moment everybody can have their SharePoint or some of its functionality and apply to his life or job. Microsoft, in my opinion, is approaching SharePoint to the maximum end users through the different products that have launched recently. So, this is the list of these products that are created for different targets of users.

Individual SharePoint

For those who want to have their documents always online and share it with their friends there is Microsoft Office Live Workspace. It allows you to upload documents, share to other users and includes collaboration functionality integrated with passport authentication. A good idea to suppress the mail with attached documents and the suffix version in the subject. We could reduce this version to a personal document library for everyone.

SharePoint Lite

Oriented to small business there is Microsoft Office Live Small Business. It gives to the small companies the opportunity to get on the web for "free". It allows the managing of the web content and the publishing of different files. On the other hand it offers the option to extend and personalize your site with the integration of SharePoint Designer and installing solution for Office Live. I am waiting to have enough time to investigate it, but it sounds very good. We can see this option like a little SharePoint site oriented to small companies.

Medium SharePoint

Announced at SharePoint Conference 2008 by Bill Gates, the Microsoft SharePoint Online
is the solution to get a fully functional SharePoint in your organization and avoid the infrastructure issues associated to a SharePoint system. It leverages all of the functionality of the product with the minimum costs. It target is those companies with no previous experience with SharePoint and is a perfect start point. The customizations are limited, but it offers, from an end user experience, a WSS installation with all the functionality provided out of the box.

Full SharePoint

The SharePoint which everybody knows installed on your own servers. WSS 3.0 is included on the license of Windows 2003 and MOSS has many licensing options that offer different functionalities (BDC, Search, Forms Services,). This is the perfect tool for medium and large companies with a need: "Connect their employees with their information". It can be extended in different manners using the browser, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio.

Please, feel free to post your comments and opinions.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

each of the above has drawbacks as follows:-

Microsoft Lite & Microsoft Small Business - The main attraction of these applications is that they are free. But they lack comprehensive functionality as needed in a business context, namely - intranet/extranet publishing, integrated email, document management, calendars, contacts, task management, mobile access.

SharePoint Hosted - It doesnt provide instant deployment. The basic solution still requires some configuration an customization.

SharePoint Full - Expensive!

Àlex said...

Yes,
It is true. But for that reason there is so many options.

On the other hand, SharePoint is not expensive. WSS is included in W2K3 license and gives you a collaborative environment OOB. If you combine it with Search Server Express (free) you have the base for a perfect collaborative environment, and it could be extended through development using SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio, or directly with solutions provided by the community (codeplex, codeproject, ...).

About MOSS, it could be considered expensive if you do not leverage all of its functionality. What would be the price of a custom development with all of the functionalities of MOSS?

Anonymous said...

would either of the options you mentioned be viable for a 20-30 employee company? the effort in the first place and the costs in the second.

Especially when you can get the same fuctionality, altho not completely customized, but customized enough from a small business perspective.

Àlex said...

Well,
For a small business WSS and Search Server Express are viable.

WSS is scalable without any limit and Search Server Express has not any restricted functionality. The only limitation respect Search Server Enterprise is the scalability.

So, I would recommend both products for a small business company with 20-30 users.

 
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