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My company has been using SharePoint WSS 3.0 for 2-3 years and we've recently upgraded to SharePoint Foundation 2010. Our use of SharePoint started in IT and has gradually moved into other areas of the company. We are currently considering an upgrade to the standard edition of SharePoint to take advantage of some additional features that don't exist in the free version. However, the price tag on this upgrade has prompted a review of possible alternatives to SharePoint.

I'm looking to the community for opinions (testimonials?) from current SharePoint users, as well as alternatives to SharePoint that others are using.

Thanks for your input!!!

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While considering alternatives to SharePoint, don't forget to include things like extensibility, ease of customization, available third party tools, in-house technology skills and overall integration with Office Apps as part of the evaluation. – Dave Wise Jul 20 '11 at 15:59
Thanks for the comments everyone!! – pmartin Nov 4 '11 at 13:17

2 Answers

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I'll be the first here to say it.

It depends

Shelling out for the features to "possibly" take advantage of them, without any concrete plans to actually use them is a project doomed to failure.

If you're unsure yet what you'll take advantage of, get the Information Worker VHD and have a play around, build a showcase environment to get buy-in for the features. Then build an adoption plan, what will be integrated when, what will be used in which way by whom.

Only then will paying out for the Standard Features be worth it.

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Yep, you can still do a lot with Foundations and SharePoint Designer (for workflows) that might solve a lot of business problems. – PirateEric Jul 20 '11 at 15:31
@James - By upgrading to the standard edition, we're looking to take advantage of the additional dashboarding and BI features, as well as the ability to create external sites. I'm looking for opinions on how good these features are as well as alternative products that can compete with this feature set. – pmartin Jul 20 '11 at 15:58
"External sites" - as in publicly accessible web sites or secured access intranet sites? Also, you will only get the BI features with the Enterprise feature set, not Standard - sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/… - see Business Intelligence Center and PerformancePoint Services, which you only get on Enterprise. – James Love Jul 20 '11 at 16:21
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Should also point out that I don't actually know any products that can compare with features such as integration with line of business, approval, versioning, customisation, security & control in one platform that comes with the scalability of SharePoint. – James Love Jul 20 '11 at 16:24
up vote 1 down vote

Our company (25000 users) is using sharepoint for their inter-and intranet facing farm. I will not keep a testimony, but if the only thing you do is collaboration, you might want to take a look at office365 (http://www.office365.com)

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