Sharepoint CMS vs UmbracoCMS

Question

I work for a large local government organisation who are about to embark on using SharePoint to replace our ageing intranet with an all-singing all-dancing collaborative site. The focus for the intranet will be replacing random files, content pages and documents that are spread across the organisation with a SharePoint installation which will magically bring order to all of this.

The decision to use SharePoint for the intranet has already been made.

The CMS we use on our public website also needs replacing. I have proposed using UmbracoCMS, but due to the pending SharePoint implementation on our intranet, my boss has suggested using SharePoint for the website too. He's suggested this from a purely logical point of view as he's not a developer, and I can understand why this course of action might appear to be the obvious way forward.

I am very skeptical about using SharePoint to cover our website. We would only need the actually 'content managerment' elements of it with much of the rest of the website being made up of existing .NET applications.

For our Intranet, developing something with SharePoint seems obvious as it will integrate with email and Office and will allow sharing of content and integrate with our Active Directory (or that's what I assume).

However, our website is completely different and contains many applications together with an archaic CMS. This is a public sector website so website accessibility and interoperability are key. It needs to be easy to use and generate clean accessible output and valid XHTML compliant code. We don't need any of the collaborative or document sharing features of SharePoint for the website.

My gut feeling with using SharePoint for the website is that it is an extremely bad idea.

I have suggested UmbracoCMS as the control I expect we will have will be greater than with SharePoint and it's integration with .NET means that we will potentially be able to knit all of our applications together more easily than with SharePoint.

Does anybody have any experience of using either or both of these products or know of any cool features in either SharePoint/Umbraco that I might make this a little more clear cut?

Answer 1

The main problem of using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for your public web site is the very high licensing cost. You will require something like an Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites license. The price is listed as USD 41,134 on the Microsoft pricing page. Other than that I have found that SharePoint is very feature rich and certainly suited for web sites other than the "standard intranet".

Answer 2

Can SharePoint be used for public facing web sites? Oh yes, indeed. If you have your doubts, check out this site: http://www.topsharepoint.com, where you'll find sites such as Ferrari, Volvo Cars, Library of Congress, Carlsberg, Viacom, KPMG and a lot of other high profile company or government organizations.

Admitted, there can be accessibility-challenges with SharePoint if you rely only on the Out of the Box-features from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server(MOSS), but in time even these issues have all been addressed. The ARF is a nice example of how some of these issues have been addressed (and now even web parts can be made to validate). Another is AKS, which even has Microsoft officially involved. A third is BKS.

If people are still making non-validating sites in SharePoint today, it could very well be because they haven't researched thoroughly or aren't prioritizing it.

If you look above the challenges of validation, I would say since you've already decided on using SharePoint for intranet, there's very little reason not to do so for your public sites also. A lot intranets running on MOSS are in fact based on it's CMS-templates, because then you get the best of both worlds. All the collaborative features can, for the most parts, be easily enabled for CMS-sites as well. In fact you get a very mature, enterprise-ready, scalable product i MOSS which also includes a range of other features like easy code-package deployment, enterprise-ready search, workflows, scheduled server-to-server content deployment, detailed user-management and a long list of other features.

I could go on and on about SharePoint, but in closing I just have to say that even the free WSS-part can be made into a CMS system, proven by sites such as Tozit and CompleteSharePoint.NET. You will most likely also find, that should you need consultants or hire people for the job, it's easier to get SharePoint-people on board than Umbraco, simply because of the big community supporting the SharePoint-platform.

Answer 3

Without knowing your complete requirements, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (as opposed to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a good solution. Licensing is free and it works well as the framework for public-facing websites. Using WSS 3.0, you'll be able to take advantage of your MOSS 2007 infrastructure, administration, and user training. I have developed a number of successful public-facing sites using SharePoint for various customers and am happy with the results.

This link provides a comprehensive comparison between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx

Answer 4

Many public organizations use SharePoint for publicly-facing internet and collaboration sites. When architected, designed, and implemented to your specifications, SharePoint can meet the requirements you have described (including the accessibility requirements).

The real gotchas with SharePoint (as with any major software engineering project) are that you have a team of competent professionals who know what they are doing.

Here are some links to lists of sites that use SharePoint to get a better idea of how existing organizations are using SharePoint:

• SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) sites by industry as wssdemo.com
• A list of the top 100 public SharePoint sites by Joel Oleson, former SharePoint Product Manager at Microsoft.