Microsoft Sharepoint Hosting
Microsoft Sharepoint Hosting
Which is a better web portal system , .NET Nuke or Microsoft Sharepoint or Rainbow?
Our extranet is currently Hosted by a 3rd Party and would we would like to move it in house. We are looking at options that can leverage our Visual Basic.Net Programmer base. Thanks!
You know, I don’t really have an answer for your question, yet. Just a word of thanks for turning me on to DotNetNuke. I’ve been developing and implementing SharePoint team sites and portals since the early betas of 2001. And we’ve just reached the magical point of maturity where you can walk into just about any IT group or internal department, they’ve already played with team sites on their own and now they’re ready for a professional to come in, clean up what they’ve done, and roll out a unified look and feel, across departments, that they can take from there.
Not that DotNetNuke or Rainbow (which I haven’t yet been able to find) aren’t going to be comparable solutions; I’ll know more when I’ve had a couple of weeks to play with DotNetNuke. But I can tell you, from some hard-won experience, that it has been an uphill battle to persuade even the early adopters to roll with SharePoint until there was a certain critical mass, which Microsoft so graciously took care of by giving Windows SharePoint Services away with the Server 2003 license, effectively flooding the market. Customers play with what they get, out of the box, realize the potential, then find it hard to get the budget or the head count to task someone full-time to the portal implementation that they’ve come to see as a cross-departmental solution.
Until recently, the path of least resistance has been to run a pretty intuitive needs analysis, lock yourself in room for a few days, and come back with a functional, if not fully populated, demonstration site that thay can take to higher management. And you’ve got to showcase plenty of functionality, and potential, that they won’t admit they need until they’ve seen it in motion. Lots of people out there still thinking in terms of one-off development, html, and maybe a java applet here and there.
I dig the open source aspect of DotNetNuke, and I’ve done a few sites on pure ASP.net 2.0; and from what I can see so far, it looks like a fairly comparable solution to SharePoint, or at least SharePoint Services. Where you’re going to run into questions is the ongoing support and maintenance, and, more importantly, the ease of use and comfort level of the non-technical staff who are going to be both using the thing day to day and populating it with fresh, useful, content and data. Afterall, the goal here, usually, is to bring people together, collaborating in new, as yet undiscovered, ways and to give them access and exposure to information that’s going to change their personal way of doing business, and its acceptance and embrace by the corporate culture, for the better.
Sure you can leverage the enviable inhouse talent that you already have for ASP and Visual Basic .NET to build a stellar solution for the powers that be. But the real issue, and one that is almost universally under-accounted for by IT and development groups everywhere, is the ease of use, and barriers to spontaneous improvement, that will spark or squelch the passion of power-users and non-IT staff, across the company, to take it to the next level.
SharePoint has reached the level where these people can, with a litle direction and encouragement, be pointed to all kinds of places where they can get their hands on web parts, feeds, and web services, that they can drop right into their littlle piece of real estate and wow the people around them, adding value to their own internal or external customer base, consumers of whatever information or service that they’ve been tasked to produce. And all without the help of, or budgetary drain to, the IT or web production departments. I hope to be able to say the same after I build a couple of demonstration sites with DotNetNuke – which I’m planning to do over the next couple of weeks.
Thanks for turning me on to DotNetNuke. And best of luck to you and your team with the new extranet and portal. If you have any SharePoint-related questions or comments, feel free to get back with me via buck@sfsharepoint.info on MSN or .NET Messenger, buckcalifornia on AOL Messenger, or buck_the_system_guy on Yahoo! Messenger. By email it’s buck@sfsharepoint.info . Good luck.
Integrate My SharePoint Lists with the Microsoft Office Outlook Client Part 1
