Is SharePoint the answer to everything?

The question in the subject line is obviously rhetorical. SharePoint will not slice, dice, and mop up spills or the hundred other things Vince sells on television. However, it is an awesome platform for delivering everything from document management services to social computing applications. SharePoint is arguably Microsoft's most successful product to date, and with good reason.

However, a recent demonstration of the Content Management Solution platform from Sitecore has made me ask the above-mentioned question in context of building an external web presence. If you were shopping for a sports car with great handling and acceleration it wouldn't make much sense to shop for an SUV. There is nothing wrong with wanting a SUV but it wouldn't satisfy the sports car aficionado. Select the product based on requirements.

SharePoint is great but comes with challenges. In certain situations (i.e. dynamic external websites) it can be difficult and costly to develop custom solutions to fit requirements. SharePoint doesn't always provide the best possible solution for content editors (publishing easy to use and workflow). Anyone requiring deep web analytics may be disappointed with out-of-box visitor reports. The overall licensing costs can also be prohibitive, depending on the architecture required (external connector licensing per server). It is not known how much of this will change with SharePoint 2010 but, for now, businesses looking for CMS solutions must select a solution that addresses organizational and web goals.

I was extremely impressed with the Sitecore solution and found myself surprised I hadn't heard of the solution before now (embarrassed might be a better description). Some early observations:

• The editing capabilities for content owners are outstanding and dead-simple to use
• Out of box CMS features and functionality (that which doesn't require huge investments in custom development) far outweigh what comes with SharePoint
• Web analytic information, out of the box, is very sophisticated and provides sales and marketing people a great tool for drilling deep into visitor habits and helps improve accessibility to relevant site content, where required
• Sitecore has a SharePoint connector and integrates with existing SharePoint deployments. This is a plus in situations where internally deployed SharePoint sites can publish to a Sitecore Internet solution
• The editing toolbar looks identical to the ribbon in Office 2007 and is easy to use
• The out of box workflow toolkit is more extensive and easier to use than workflow tools in SharePoint

Admittedly, I just had my first glimpse of the product this morning. However, based on almost a decade of experience with web content management systems, this is by far the most impressive I've seen to date. I can't wait to dive into Sitecore more and get a better understand of this great product!

Comments

[dguarnaccia.wordpress.com]

Great post Tim, and I'm glad you liked what you saw. If you are like me, you'll get even more excited when you start to dig into the product itself and see just how open and flexible it is. There's a great blog writeup comparing different tasks in Sitecore and Sharepoint that you might find interesting as well by Julius Ganns. Here is a link to his blog http://jgnk.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!457F4BDBA1A371A5!271.entry

Look forward to more of your thoughts as you dig in!

[Tim Peterson]

Thanks for the comment and link to Julius' blog! I'll check it out over the weekend. I can't wait to get more "under the hood" and evangelize Sitecore to customers out west. Have a great weekend.

Tim

[Eric D. Brown]

I've been working with Sitecore for a bit over 2 years and Sharepoint for about a year. For an external web presence, Sitecore wins hands down. We've been integrating the two platforms recently and are seeing some excellent results.

[kimberly mccabe]

Hi Tim,

Glad you found Sitecore! I work with Oshyn and we do a lot of CMS integration work. I recently had the chance to go through an extensive Sitecore OMS demonstration with Sitecore's Chris Brill - and I was hands down impressed. As a marketing professional, I have to say Sitecore is awesome. Anyway, I thought you might find our latest whitepaper on Sitecore interesting: http://www.oshyn.com/landingpages/best-practices-for-sitecore-cms We've just started (barely) blogging about Sitecore on Oshyn's website.

[David Scalera]

Tim, I recommend you take a look at Ektron as well. We've been in the WCMS space for over ten years with thousands of deployments - more than twice as many as any other .NET commercial CMS solution (excluding SharePoint of course). Built in Enterprise 2.0/Social Networking tools. All 100% .NET. www.ektron.com. Please contact me with any questions.
-Dave Scalera
Director of Enterprise Sales

[Geof Harries]

Tim, what's your opinion of Sitecore vs. Sitefinity? We're just about to start using the latter, but I'm intrigued by what appears to be a better content editing interface for end-users with Sitecore.