The two main alternatives to SharePoint: Nuxeo and Alfresco
If you’re thinking of implementing an enterprise content management system, it’s likely that SharePoint is one of the options that you’re considering. It’s not just because of its widespread use (more than 125 million licenses, 65,000 clients and a network of 700,000 developers of solutions for SharePoint): it’s also because, probably, it’s the product that is closest to the software that your business usually uses.
Nonetheless, you should also be aware of the significant problems that SharePoint brings with it. In other posts, we’ve talked in more depth about the inconvenient aspects of SharePoint, but today we’re just going to do a quick summary of those which, in my opinion, are the most critical ones:
Pricey licenses: Not only for SharePoint itself, but also for all the technical requirements connected to software that choosing SharePoint implies. And though many would say that SharePoint Services is free, they also have to admit that WSS has insufficient functionality which isn’t enough to meet the content management needs for the majority of medium-sized and large businesses.
Technical infrastructure: SharePoint is a collaboration platform, and a powerful one at that; but it has to be “constructed”, not just simply implemented. What’s more, performing development work on SharePoint requires fairly deep knowledge of the platform and, unfortunately, it doesn’t have the most perfect learning curve out there. That means that, before choosing SharePoint, we should ask ourselves if the infrastructure that we have is the ideal one to deal with these problems.
Going back to our original topic, let’s take a quick look at the ECM solutions which we, and many others, consider to be the best alternatives to SharePoint.