Small Business Intranets, There's More Than SharePoint

By Toby Ward (@tobyward) Feb 4, 2011

6 comments

Many organizations cannot afford $50 to 150 per user for a top flight intranet. Enterprise content management systems (ECMSs) and portals such as SharePoint, and the like, traditionally cost a pretty penny up front, and a shocking amount in annual licensing, support, maintenance and staffing. The costs of these systems have naturally created a niche for small market solutions that have grown and evolved considerably in the past 10 years.

There’s More than SharePoint

“SharePoint is most certainly overkill in most cases,” says Michael Jones, Marketing Coordinator for The ADWEB Agency that produces Intranet DASHBOARD, an Australian-based intranet solution. “It's like using a commercial harvester to prune your roses, or implementing SAP at your local convenience store. SharePoint is effectively a development platform which companies can use to create an intranet, but unless they have complex custom requirements (and a large development budget), SharePoint isn't the right tool to use.”

SharePoint has become the measuring stick, and the whipping boy, by which most all other intranet technology platforms are compared. Microsoft has invested so much into SharePoint (literally billions of dollars), and markets it at so many levels, it is, in effect, a blanket solution that attempts to be everything to everyone:

Web content management
Enterprise content management
Portal
Development platform
Business intelligence
Social networking
Enterprise search
Etc.

Small surprise then it is deployed in about two-thirds of Western World organizations that have an intranet, even in small businesses (SMBs), but at a price.

“Proprietary portal applications and intranet solutions are overkill for small organizations, not just because of the initial costs, but often ongoing maintenance costs; medium businesses may be able to afford, software costs, setup and support, but is the portal putting money back into the company,” says Gifford Watkins, CEO of Atlantic Webfitters, an Atlantic Canada implementation vendor of open source CMS, DotNetNuke (DNN).

DNN is not a pure, nor as robust an alternative to SharePoint, but it is a gradually more popular choice for many small, and medium size businesses who require web content management (WCMS). DNN allows SMBs to get their feet wet for less than SharePoint (SP) yet shares a common architecture: Microsoft's (MS) SQL Server, MS ASP.net and Microsoft's IIS are the foundations for both SharePoint (SP) and DNN. However, the similarities chiefly end there as DNN doesn’t have the bells-and-whistles sported by SP, nor is it a true portal or ECMS.

The biggest difference is price: the price tag of an SP intranet for 100 employees is often in the US$ 10,000 to $30,000 range; Atlantic Webfitters typically deploys DNN for under $5,000, and sometimes for under $2,000.

Commercial Alternatives

“SharePoint and other enterprise level CMS solutions can be a daunting task for SMBs, requiring in-house expertise, resources, development and consultants,” says Rachel Lai, Marketing Manager of Vancouver-based Intranet Connections which offers a hosted, proprietary solution with unlimited users that starts at $8,500. “Often these type of enterprise platforms require a lengthy development and deployment cycle and we often hear from our SMBs that their SharePoint project essentially withered and died before it got off the ground.”

While it is possible to deploy SP and other CMS solutions in a few weeks time, a customized SP or ECMS solution can typically require 9-12 months for planning and implementation. Solutions such as Intranet Connections can be deployed in a matter of days.

“Going with a turnkey, out-of-the-box intranet solution like Intranet Connections can allow SMBs rapid intranet implementation so that they can move on to other pressing projects and focus on what’s important in getting an intranet launched, such as "how can we best use this great new tool to communicate and collaborate with our employees,” adds Lai.