SharePoint Portal Alternatives - A Credible List

This is a good list and I really don't think SharePoint is a credible alternative for a small distributed business. It's hard to maintain, setup and use functionally.

Mostly my firms requirements are to access files, share files, and also securely store files, as well as be able to have permissions on folders, create groups etc.

However, one of the things I found difficult was to find a provider who does not lock me into their propreitary storage solution. I tried some of those on your list but ended up with dual copies of files. Some store on Amazon S3, our chosen backup solution, some on Google Docs, our document platform, and the same files on the collaboration platform.

After much looking around I settled on SMEStorage Organisation Cloud. It gives me the collaboration features I need but also let's me use my Amazon S3 and Google Docs as the storage. It is a worthwile addition to your list I think as it add something different.

Barbara,

Thank you for mentioning HyperOffice. We certainly consider ourselves a SharePoint alternative as we as an Exchange alternative.

I think fresh content is lacking to help businesses best understand the trade of off collaboration services, I think CMSWire would be a great place to build a comparison matrix for collaboration software or even broader the MS BPOS, Google Apps category.

If I may take that a step further, maybe have one for enterprises and one for SMBs since requirements vary and resources and budgets range so much. If we can help with such a study please let me know.

BTW - if you would like to get a briefing now is a great time as we are about to roll out our new ajax version - biggest upgrade in 10 years.

Thanks again.

“If you think there's another SharePoint alternative who should be in this list, we welcome you to name them via the comments below”

Hi Barb, this list of SharePoint alternatives looks like a good starting point. If I may, I would like to add Atlassian Confluence to this list. Confluence has over 8,000 active deployments (mostly in support of corporate intranets and knowledge bases) and hundreds of third-party plugins. In fact, a recent SharePoint article in CIO magazine lists Confluence as one of Three Social Networking Alternatives to SharePoint.

I think open source DotNetNuke is a good alternative to Sharepoint. Sharepoint vs. DotNetNuke article.
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2006/01/31/437023.aspx

Both run on ASP.net, so if you want to tap into a huge community of open source developers, it could be a viable option for small, medium and large firms. Comparing Content Management Systems to Sharepoint “portal” is apples to oranges. DotNetNuke is a web application framework (like an operating system) for your browser.

I don't work for DotNetNuke, but was surprised they weren't mentioned as a viable, scalable, enterprise alternative.

http://software.nasdaq.com/content-management-software provides a fairly comprehensive list of CMS firms.

This is a great list. My vote would be for Box.net for file sharing and MindTouch for more comprehensive collaboration. If you have the money for the big guys software, can't go wrong with that either- unless no one buys-in of course. We keep a decent list as well: http://collaborationking.com/collaboration-software/

Hope it helps!

Brandon

Glasnost provides Project, Contact & Image mgmt, all
presented as a rich Internet application.

Based around a real time activity feed it is very
easy to see everything that is going on in your business.

Storage is on Amazon S3 and live integration
with Twitter, Google News and Blogs adds SocialCRM
characteristics.

A live demo is available on the website to try it out.

Please take a look.

Antony Slumbers

Nice article. Here's one in Dutch on Productivity Infra Optimization:

http://bit.ly/vrijheid-blijheid

Best regards,
Maik

Sorry but in comment 6 I forgot to give a clear link to Glasnost 21, where you can read about the service, watch videos, or 'play' with a live demonstration version.

http://www.glasnost21.com

Thank you

Antony

adenin IntelliEnterprise is another Sharepoint alternative (www.adenin.com). The company also has Intranet Wireframes for making it easier and faster to implement an intranet.

Good article, but you're missing the .net/MSFT ecosystem. We (NewsGator) have over 2 mill enterprise seats deployed for our SocialSites platform on SharePoint among the Global 2000. MSFT is pushing hard toward hosted offerings, which will accelerate SP for SMB in our view. Great article yesterday on our customers Accenture and Edelman here; http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/02/26/urnidgns002570F3005978D8852576D6007D5F83.DTL

Another alternative is to use SharePoint for internal document management and a strong CMS for the public face.

The open source TYPO3 CMS (typo3.com) has a SharePoint to TYPO3 connector available that both pulls from and feeds into SharePoint. SharePoint calendars and documents can all be part of the internet site when desired. TYPO3 will work with Active Directory to match internet and intranet access permissions and share logins.

http://www.typotycoon.com/products/sharepoint-connector/ has more details on the SharePoint to TYPO3 connection tools.

Regards — Tony

Indeed where is Altassian's Confluence in this list?

Manny (In fact most) of my clients have Confluence somewhere in their mix and in many cases is it beating out Sharpoint in the hearts of users.

I would add O3Spaces to this list. Yes, I am biased since I resell this product, but it's the users I work with that made the choice. O3Spaces Edition 3.1 is unique in that both departmental workgroups and enterprise deployments scale very nicely. Administration and ease-of-use have improved significantly in this latest edition.
All of the compatibility and openness are still in the product but new solution modules - templates, rules for work flow, email archiving and scanning make O3Spaces a viable alternative.

If any of your readers would like a demonstration, solution walk-thru or hosted trial, please have them contact me directly.
info@opensystems21.com

Great list and opening remarks about SharePoint! Although it's a very powerful tool, sometimes it's got too much functionality for what most groups need.

Although we're biased, check out ProjectSpaces as well, www.projectspaces.com. We strive for simplicity, bringing you the all tools you need to get the job done, but keeping down the clutter you experience with some of the other tools. We focus most heavily around documents, but there are also tasks, email lists, discussions, announcements, events, etc. to provide you with all your project management needs.

Sign up for a free trial today (no credit card needed!), and let us know if you have any questions — sales@projectspaces.com

Microsoft® SharePoint® is hard to define, partly because it means different things to different people. Forrester?s Matthew Brown sees SharePoint as a ?broad platform for rapid application development, Intranet and Internet sites, content management, search, social computing, and composite applications?? Microsoft defines SharePoint (MOSS) as ?an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and Enterprise Search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all Intranet, Extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.?

But what if you need to enable non-technical business users to create and manage Social Knowledge Networks (SKNs). SKNs are virtual environments organized around high value business processes or objectives, such as product innovation, proposal development, or competitive intelligence. SKNs bring together content, people, and tools for information access and discovery. SKNs use the ?wisdom of the community? through profiles, comments, and blogs to promote discussion, sharing, and community-building centered on valuable content.

Focused on a process or objective, SKNs increase productivity, foster innovation, and improve the retention and preservation of knowledge.

Inmagic® Presto has been purpose built for SKNs.
SharePoint has made tremendous inroads into the enterprise space. In many organizations, SharePoint Team Sites and My Sites are multiplying rapidly. Usually, the information generated within a SharePoint Team Site does not become available to others. So while enhancing collaboration on a project level, Team Sites tend to isolate content into thousands of micro-silos.
Presto spans across the various repositories - including SharePoint Sites - to index pertinent content and make it available to end-users. When a new Team Site is created, for example to create a complex proposal, the team can search Presto from within SharePoint to retrieve relevant proposals, images, and contracts, all of which are rated so that the best of each float to the top.
The SharePoint-compatible Web Parts and a Web Services API allow Presto to easily integrate into other applications, including SharePoint. You can create internal, secure knowledge networks around enterprise content, with sophisticated social, search, security, and library workflow capabilities not found in SharePoint.
So when your need is an SKN, do you need both Presto and SharePoint? The answer is yes, if you have both. By augmenting against existing infrastructure, Presto enables organizations to maximize and improve upon SharePoint and other technology investments. Can you build an SKN with SharePoint? Well, maybe. But at what cost, how long will it take and certainly not by your business users.

Agree that the list is long and there are many alternatives. I would add OpenText's Content Server product, formerly know as Livelink, should also be on the list - http://www.opentext.com - I've used it for many years and found it to be a better offering than sharepoint for many customers and clients. It works for DM and SM as well as many others and has a modular design so you can get the right mix for you.

Sharepoint promulgates the 'everything must live in a document' approach to information management which we find inefficient and non intuitive to use and inhibits reuse of information.

At Consult4you we collaborate and manage our data, information and knowledge using wiki technologies. Why? Because they fit the way the humans think and work, they require magnitudes less physical storage space, they are bandwidth efficient, especially as we work anywhere and everywhere, and most of all they provide us with continual and dynamic feedback on what is changing, who is contributing and the full change history is maintained efficiently. The security aspects are also significant as we don't have valuable IP stored on netbooks and laptops. This is an area where tools like Sharepoint fail miserably.

Atlassian's Confluence is the standout commercial wiki and TikiWiki is an excellent open source solution. I have deployed Confluence in large defence organisations with great success although the IT dinosaurs cannot seem to think outside the Sharepoint box. Sharepoint is quite old technology and is not efficient at indexing or managing relational data. In this day and age where a low carbon and energy footprint is essential we have found wiki technologies to be significantly more environmentally friendly than outdated document management technologies.

Another vendor in the document collaboration and business social computing is IGLOO Software - http://www.igloosoftware.com.

We don't promote ourselves as an MS SharePoint alternative (even though we can replace it in many areas) but more as a social and team solution extension to it. If you have MS SharePoint… why not leverage your investment… if you can. That's why we offer widgets to 3rd party applications like SF.com and MS SharePoint. If you don't… we can provide you with a robust social software suite which includes powerful and secure content management, collaboration, social networking and web publishing. And we even offer a free version.

More and more vendors - like us are emerging in this space offering great alternatives to the old standbys.

Customers today are demanding solutions that are fast to deploy, affordable to buy, feature rich, extensible, configurable and branded.

Hello friends,

I would commend you on a fine effort but as might be expected, I believe that you have missed an extremely viable alternative, being Novell Teaming. As you expand your view and update this document please give our offering consideration. Should you have questions, I would be pleased to help.

Best regards.

Novell Teaming is a great alternative especially if the real business need is around improving team and project productivity. Teaming has been recognized as a leader by top analysts and is seeing great customer growth. Teaming provides secure online workspaces. Not only does it allow robust file sharing and versioning, but out-of-the-box there are also wikis, blogs, surveys, calendars, discussions, micro-blogs, photo albums, tasks and milestones. Every personal or team workspace can leverage each of these information types in any configuration and be highly secure. Everything is indexed and searchable with flexible searching options for finding information based on text strings, tags, people, location, expertise and advanced searches. There is also a powerful workflow engine and the ability to create custom information types using custom forms.

We just released Teaming 2.1 which added a powerful new mobile UI, productivity improvements for users and improved partner tools. Teaming helps people more effectively manage information and documents, leverage web 2.0 and social tools, improves collaboration with distributed teams and automate business processes in a single tool. Teaming is less costly and easier to install and manage. The Teaming Library is also available as a resource to help people better understand and leverage the power of Teaming. You can get 20 free licenses to Teaming by following a link on the product page.

Sorry for the self plug but we tend to get looked over with these articles. Noodle constantly replaces or works along side Sharepoint. Most of our converstations with clients start out, “so we have this sharepoint site”.

I encurage anyone to have a look.
http://www.vialect.com

Thanks

I can't believe that anyone would seriously suggest DotNetNuke as a “a viable, scalable, enterprise alternative” to Sharepoint (see comment 4 above).
My organisation has tried working with DotNetNuke and it is a total nightmare (it has a dreadful user interface, it is very difficult to customise, it is not W3C compatible, and the results we have attained are invariably amateur in appearance and feel) - my advice: leave well alone. And its claim to open source is questionable - just try finding any decent add-ons or skins that you don't have to pay for.
Conclusion: Try Drupal or WordPress instead.

We are a low-cost and turnkey alternative to Sharepoint. A lot of our customers have tried a Sharepoint implementation but just didn't have the time, IT resources and cost to get Sharepoint off the ground for their intranet. They chose Intranet Connections for its ease of use, simplicity, and quick implementation.

http://www.intranetconnections.com/sharepoint-alternative/index.cfm

Thanks for the opportunity to contribute!

Good article Barb - thank you.

I like the fact that you split the SharePoint side of things into the two main elements of document centric collaboration and social 'computing'.

One product I like a lot, which brings the two together for an intranet scenario is ThoughtFarmer. As I am a SharePoint guy I can absolutely state that ThoughtFarmer is easier to setup, easier to use and easier to admin.It is a .net platform product, and has good integration with Active Directory, and in my humble opinion provides a far better intranet site experience than MOSS2007. See www.thoughtfarmer.com

I am surprised that Oracle WebCenter or even ECM did not make the list. The day you wrote this, Dmitri Khanine reviewed Oracle's offering and pointed out that it meets or beats SharePoint's platform capabilities for document collaboration (link: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/document-management/cms-review-oracle-universal-content-management-ucm-006732.php) . Similarly, Gilbane group has long outlined how Oracle ECM compares favorably to SharePoint as a platform solution - see their information workplace platforms research (http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/content-management/docs/gilbane-workplace.pdf) . Today I am headed to an AIIM meeting where the topic of discussion is their “State of the Market: Microsoft SharePoint” research which outlines sharepoint weakness vis-a-vi Oracle's offering.

Finally last year CMS Wire reported on our own “CollabPoint” add on to Oracle ECM saying that, “With this new solution, Fishbowl has addressed the problem of ?knowledge? and assets consigned to silos where only the creator, or a limited number of collaborators can access it, and gives Oracle UCM an asset retrieval flexibility that, to date, has only really existed with SharePoint.” (link: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/a-new-collaboration-solution-for-oracle-ucm-004572.php)

We uses IBN Project Management, it includes both task, project and help desk and custom list options and require no time for making this work. I think it's good solution for small businesses. For anyone interested - http://ibnportal.com

It was interesting for me to learn about listed alternatives to SharePoint above, but I want to tell about one new and effective form builder.

It is called iTechnology Forms Accelerator. It's quite new and at the same time powerful SharePoint-based product with modern and sleek Silverlight design. This application allowing business users and developers to design customized Forms. Forms designing involve simple actions and commands that enable even non-developers to easily work with it.

It has some competitive features like:
- Web-based designer;
- Built-in SharePoint based version control;
- One-click publish;
- Workflow and K2 [blackpearl] or K2 [blackpoint] integration;
- Collaboration mode for shared building of the form with other users;
- Easy form customization;
- Repeatable elements are provided for multi-column content;
- Different types of elements are organized in groups of controls: text, number, date, Boolean, attachments;
- Hierarchical data model;
- Embedded validation of rules, formulas and whole form content;
- Simple Export and Import of Designed Forms;
- Business templates provided;

?If you think there's another SharePoint alternative who should be in this list, we welcome you to name them via the comments below?

Hello,

You might want to consider Intrexx (http://www.unitedplanet.com).
Short learning curve, no programming skills required, easily integrates other systems and comes with a powerful process manager. Java-based and therefore platform-independent. Supports the most common databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2), even open-source products like Postgres or Apache Derby.

The intention is that even non-IT staff can manage the portal and create applications. So no expensive consultancy necessary.
Furthermore there are 100+ ready-made apps available.

The software exists for more than 12 years and is proven by several thousand customers from all industries worlwide.

Oliver

someone mentioned DotNetNuke as scalable.

it's not. it's a horrible database driven system that can't handle 200000 users and 50 portals without dying.

it's a nightmare for large systems.

it's GREAT however, for smaller ones.

Interwoven Worksite (DeskSite) is another viable option for document collaboration—see http://www.smartcollabs.com/?Products:WorkSite.

SharePoint 2010 is a dramatic upgrade. I think we have to take this into consideration as well..

Or try the special Summer VMware Appliance of another Sharepoint Alternative, O3spaces Workplace (See: http://summershowcase.o3spaces.com/). To get you into the summertime spirit, all content of the virtual machine is related to an imaginary travel agency that offers trips to beautiful places all over the world.