No, we’re not leaving SharePoint. We are reducing our SharePoint footprint though and I thought that I’d start a periodic mini-series on this subject. The mini-series appeals to me because I don’t think I can cram enough material into a single post and still squeeze under that self-imposed 800-word limit. Raise your hand if you want me to abandon that limit…yeah, I thought so.
So, what is it exactly that we are reducing about the way we use SharePoint? We are beginning a project that will gradually eliminate our Internet-facing SharePoint site. Why are we doing this? There are lots of reasons, but I’ll limit this post to three:
It’s Complicated – Not the answer, the answer is pretty simple, but having an Internet-facing SharePoint server is complicated. That SharePoint server runs under a separate domain, so we had to build a Trust between our in-house server and the outside server. Even though this allowed us to let our employees have access with their in-house domain credentials, they still have to log in. We could eliminate that step if we designated our in-house domain as the primary domain, but then our business partners, the people we built this server for, would have to include the domain in their user name. We tried that and the results were terrible.
While we can tell our employees to “suck it up and include the domain name and the forward slash, you know, the one over the Enter key, with your user name” we can’t really tell our customers to do that.
It’s not just complicated for people, it’s complicated for software. MetaVis, Harmon.ie, Muhimbi and HarePoint all had to make tweaks to their product to let us work across the two farms. I think it’s pretty cool that they all made those tweaks, but we quickly learned that it is one of the things we have to ask vendors about their products. I look forward to not caring about that capability in the future.
It’s Expensive – When we started out, the outside SharePoint server was a separate physical box. In addition, we had a separate server acting as the domain controller for that domain. These are both virtual servers now, but they still represent two Windows Server licenses, as well as a SharePoint license as well as, well I think none of us actually we all understand Microsoft licensing. Of course there’s more to buy than licenses, those servers have to be maintained, upgraded, backed-up and tended to during power outages.
It’s not just expensive from Microsoft; it’s expensive for some of that other software as well. Add-on software vendors seem to follow weird currents in the industry. Some drift toward the “pay enough money and you can use this anywhere” model and some like the À la carte approach. Unfortunately, when stuff is priced at the “enterprise” level, the companies who benefit are the companies with hundreds of servers. Having 2 servers and paying enterprise prices is a budget story that never ends well.
It’s not what people want – This is the most significant reason of all, our business partners do not want to use SharePoint as a way to get the information they want from us. It might be a sad commentary on the state of ECM. It might be a reflection on what we did or didn’t do with SharePoint. It might just be that SharePoint was overkill, but it’s not wanted. Most of our historic (we’ve been doing this since 2006) use of SharePoint can be filed under the category of “file sharing.” People go to our site to get documents that we have, or they use SharePoint as a conduit to move documents between themselves and our employees. SharePoint worked, but there are other products and / or services that work just as well, perhaps better. These alternatives are less complicated and they are less expensive and they work the way our customers want to work.
Next up in this series, I’ll talk a little bit more about what our customers want and about some of the solutions we considered and some of the reasons we did or didn’t like them. I started off by saying that this would be a periodic series, meaning that you shouldn’t expect to see that story next week. Every time I try to plan the story I want to share next week, something interesting happens and I end up pre-empting the scheduled subject.
