Posted by tgeller on May 4, 2011 at 4:34pm
I recently received an email from someone who'd taken one of my lynda.com courses. He writes:
The company that recently hired me to redesign their website is asking about possibly using Sharepoint - while I am promoting Drupal. Is there any information about performance of webpages using Sharepoint versus those using Drupal? I found on the Microsoft website an issue about downgraded functionality for browsers other than MS IE. Any input you may have would be greatly appreciated.
Does anyone know of materials I could pass on to him? By "performance" I think he means everything -- usability, features, etc. -- not just speed.
Thanks!
Comments
Keynote Speech D7 + more
Maybe the keynote speech for D7.
Goverment uptake of Aquia. UK, Netherlands, USA, etc.
Lullabot podcast with Dries.
Also on Dries own blog there is lots of detail on the comparisons of different CMSs including sharepoint - which they lost out to on a pitch as well apparently.
Usage figures.
MTV, Whitehouse, Economist websites.
Case studies.
Grammies and related podcasts showing massive scaled content delivery.
Drupal + Infrastructure = awesome.
Upgradeable from different versions. E.g. 6 to 7.
D8 and mobile. D7 and Mobile. Apps versus mobile/cross platform tailored sites.
Architecture for Humanity. Very large organisation cross country with micro sites.
Aquia as a SaaS partner - e.g. Hosting and Support.
No expensive fees outside of service agreement which is tangible.
Sharepoint binds you to one vendor, upgrading and moving is not much of an option/expensive.
Offer the company to use open collaborative tools e.g. google docs, etc.
Offer internal sites e.g. OpenAtrium for project management. Basically Phase 2's aresnal of ready to go products. (They are also awesome).
If you have the internal talent to operate and manage, extend and enhance your systems it's usually cheaper and more effective to have your own system.
If not, sharepoint and similar are perceived as more "out of the box" which appeals and has that cuddly appeal of Microsoft for business.
Case studies on Drupal.org lots to choose from.
I spent a long while trying to compile some figures and arguements for Drupal use for SME's its tricky and you want to avoid being drawn on Drupal as an alternative to X-Product/service.
Drupal hasn't quite gained traction yet as "the CMS of Businesses". But if budgets are an issue and they can phase/stage the delivery of the solution, then its amazing. If money is no object or immediate scale and a lack of testing time is required, throw sharepoint their way.
To be fair both are good products, but currently there isn't an obvious like-for-like equivalent of sharepoint in Drupal...........
It will come down to what the end result is intended to be and what their ultimate aims are.
IMHO for Websites Drupal probably has the edge and will do everything a Sharepoint site can do. However For big integrated, multi department, Microsoft product integrated offices probably sharepoint, that also serves as Website and Front end and ties in with the wider ecosystem of Microsoft products (basically their favourite clients).
Usability is all down to the web designer and development. Testing + Testing + Testing = Good Usability.
Features: D6 is rich with stable awesome features, if you wonder off the beaten path you'll usually find a good reason for why people didn't do it that way.
D7: Not as rich as its been out for less time. But Views 3 is incredible and query driven - therefore can output most of what you need.
Then think anything in PHP, Javascript, (Jquery), name drop HTML 5 and CSS3 - backwards compatability. Contributed and well used/tested themes lowering dev. time and testing.
Then maybe argue that speed is no issue as you can distribute your content delivery, scale hosting, etc etc. Mainly a question of optimisation although D7 for me seems slower than D6 by and large.
Drupal is cross platform, can be made Mobile, Ipad, etc.
App developers sometimes use Drupal to mine data into Apps so you only update the Drupal site to change the APP. content.
However, because Drupal development is in the hands of the developer (Duh!) a key question, is can he develop it? Can his team deliver this? What are the costs/time.
Just a few experiences we have had along the way. Sorry I don't have a fact sheet. I think this should be suggested to the Drupal Community.
http://www.alltooeasy.co.uk
Thanks for taking the time to
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Relevant, specific URLs would help a lot.
Tom Geller * Oberlin * San Francisco * TomGeller.com
Author/Presenter, Drupal video series at lynda.com
Creator of materials for Drupal-focused companies
Fair enough
Soz, was working late and hammering out some ideas. In response to this I've started a post on the LinkedIn Community Group.
http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=117056&type=member&item=5286...
I want to crowd source a fact sheet on Marketing Drupal. Including case studies, etc. I'll post it back to the community when its done. Please add here, or on LinkedIn, I'll compile it and post it back here or a download link.
Thanks! Surprised this hasn't been done before.
http://www.alltooeasy.co.uk
Simple things that blows away SharePoint
Kind regards, Baris Wanschers
What are the use cases where both are an option?
What is Sharepoint generally used for? Which business processes are run on Sharepoint?
What specific Drupal areas/modules are Sharepoint-like?
Sharepoint and Drupal don't serve the same markets
I'm with yoroy on this one (or at least I agree with the value of asking those questions before spending too much time trying to create a functional comparison).
I don't think that Sharepoint and Drupal serve the same markets.
If all you are doing is setting up a website, then Sharepoint is overkill. And it is an extremely expensive and unwieldy choice of overkill at that.
If, on the other hand, you have a pre-existing Microsoft Office-based, tightly integrated document workflow environment where you want to integrate work processes between the sales/production side of your organization with the web/intranet side, then Sharepoint will be an obvious contender to consider amongst a host of others, but Drupal would not be a primary contender in that group.
Phil.
Excellent Information - Thank You
Tom, thanks for posting this discussion item - good information.
Baris, the migration from Sharepoint to Drupal is a confirmation of what others are saying - quicker and easier adaptation - than you.
Marketing Fact Sheet for Drupal.
http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=117056&type=member&item=5286...
I want to crowd source a fact sheet on Marketing Drupal. Including case studies, etc. I'll post it back to the community when its done. Please add here, or on LinkedIn, I'll compile it and post it back here or a download link.
Thanks! Surprised this hasn't been done before.
http://www.alltooeasy.co.uk
Case studie: Microsoft SharePoint versus Drupal
Recently, I was assigned the task to do a solution assessment for a very large corporation.
They already use a highly customized SP (SharePoint) site as their main website and wanted me to study several solution candidates (including SP and Drupal) to find the best fit solution with the highest out of the box supportability to get the job done quickly and very cost efficient.
The idea was to create some kind of site on the extranet in a very specific context.
For this site it must be possible to work collaboratively (a lot of stakeholders) on online web content (roles, permissions, user management, workflows, revisions), but also it had to be very flexible when it came to content representation and security was a high priority!
The best advice I can give you:
1) Start with requirement engineering, establish a set of requirements.
2) Identify a list of solution candidates (In this case SP and Drupal) --> get versions SP 2010? Drupal 7 because it does matter.
3) Match the requirements for each of these solutions and see how much direct, indirect or no support they provide. (Simple matrix will do...)
4) Estimate how much work will be needed to implement all requirements.
5) Estimate a budget --> this is were it is all about.
Turned out my final assessment showed that Drupal 7 was the best fit solution. Because it is a very flexible CMS (content management system), it is "free" and easy to set up and provided the highest out of the box supportability for solving our problem.
What is the problem with SP?
SP could do the job equally well eventually. However the context of this problem was so specific that it relied a lot on the CMS features and required flexible context representation. SP is great for document management but lacks a lot of out of the box support when it comes to content management. (for example: custom content types are possible in SP but aren't nearly as flexible as the custom content types you can define in Drupal).
SP would require a lot of customization to get the job done and for SP this is expensive as hell!
Did they go for Drupal?
No, eventually Drupal was not the way to go for several reasons:
- they dislike open source software. (Secrecy is security mentality)
- SP was already an important part of the organization. (in house SP development team)
- Introduction of another CMS would bring extra costs in development, backups...
What about your case?
There is no doubt that SP will cost you more (infrastructure, licencing costs, development), especially for building a customized website that deviates from the standard SP template look and feel and probably with some new functionality that SP can not provide out of the box. So if money is a big concern, don't go SP. Although Drupal isn't entirely free and will also require a budget (maintenance, development, infrastructure). A lot depends on the requirements and the context they live in. Drupal can only be compared to SP in the areas they have common. SP can offer a lot more than Drupal can. But if the context is specific enough and implementation time and cost play a vital role it might be better to go for Drupal.
Drupal or SP --> it is all about the context.
Kind Regards,
Dennis
Very good info
Two bits that I'd like you to elaborate on if you can:
"Drupal can only be compared to SP in the areas they have common."
What are the main overlapping areas. Which ones are unique to Drupal, which to SP?
"SP can offer a lot more than Drupal can."
Oh? Do tell :-)
Thanks for writing this up.
Sharepoint is actually very
Sharepoint is actually very similar to Drupal. Both are a "box of lego" and can be customized to do many things. As people have mentioned, SP's strength is document management, and to a lesser extent, workflow. Out of the box, it is a decent Intranet. I actually think that comparing Open Atrium to Sharepoint out of the box would be an interesting match up.
SP just isn't that great at being a public facing website.
SP is harder to theme.
Generally, both Drupal and SP will require customization to get what you want out of them. If you look at SP customization prices, they tend to be much higher than Drupal.
Elaborate on two bits
The main overlapping areas:
Taxonomy (new in SP 2010)
Drupal 7:
It is open software and working with community build modules has it advantages and disadvantages.
==> You can easily add new functionality, but these modules get outdated easily when a newer version of Drupal arrives. So interoperability is a problem if you want to update. You rely on others to update their module or you have to help them out in order to make the module work with a newer version of Drupal. Go to the Drupal module page and check how many modules are still waiting to be ported to Drupal 7.
==> Drupal modules often get build by people who need them for their own use. You often find modules which are very context specific. So it is hard to use them in your context without modifying it to suit your needs.
A node is a very powerful and flexible element of Drupal. It's not hard at all to represent your content using a custom node.
It's build in PHP. The combo of HTML, CCS, JS and PHP often makes it easier for people to understand and start building their own modules. Small learning curve.
The technology it is build on is much cheaper and easier to set up.
SharePoint 2010:
SP has CMS capabilities but must be seen as a larger platform with a very broad range of features. One of these powerful features is document management and it does this rather well with Office integration. This is still a hassle for Drupal, but like the previous poster stated, Open Atrium tries to match. This means that in a lot of cases SP means overkill.
SP works with SP sites and site collections. Instead of having just one site, companies can have multiple sites that depend on each other. Permissions can be inherited from the top level site down.
Since SP is a Microsoft product it allows easy integration of other Microsoft products like: office but also Windows Based Authentification, Active Directory...
Changing the look and feel of SP is just a pain in the ass. It works with Powerpoint themefiles to change font & color settings. If you want to change the layout you need to modify the masterpage which needs SP Designer. This is just ridiculous and still needs a lot of work.
For modifying content it has a real neat WYSIWYG-editor based on Word 2007-2010. In my opinion much better then all other WYSIWYG-editors out there. You must be used to the Office Ribbon though.
It uses ASP.NET, no comment here. :)
It has a hard time with browser compatibility. Even IE fails to render all elements properly.
Writing SP modules is not a easy thing to do.
You pay for support and this is often a very important factor for companies in choosing the tool that feels secure.
Conclusion:
"Drupal can only be compared to SP in the areas they have common." SP and Drupal can only be compared as content management systems, Drupal is a powerful and flexible CMS and SP has content management capabilities but that is not its main focus. In order to really get what I am trying to say, get access to a SP 2010 testing environment and Drupal setup to get a hands on experience and see which areas overlap and which do not. Only then will you get an idea on which platform to use for the context.
If you ask me the question: which CMS would you prefer?
I would go Drupal without a doubt, because it is a lot more flexible in all ways. (extensibility, theming, content representation)
If you ask me the question: which collaboration platform with document management capabilities would you prefer for our enterprise?
I would go for SP.
Regards,
Dennis
Hey Tom, Late to the party
Hey Tom,
Late to the party here, but here is a blog post that one my colleagues did called "Drupal v. Sharepoint from a Developer's Viewpoint" - there are a few additional links in the post as well that would be pertinent.
http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/drupal-vs-sharepoint
Cheers,
Dave
Materials comparing Drupal to SharePoint
All,
We have come across several organizations asking about some of the specific differences between Sharepoint and Drupal so we created a fact sheet to help compare some of the key attributes:
Drupal vs. Sharepoint Fact Sheet
Also, one of our recent projects actually brought a large organization to Drupal from SharePoint using Drupal Commons 3.0.
Updated Sharepoint Review
You can check out my latest Sharepoint comparison here: http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/comparing-social-business-platforms-par...
Thanks!
Follow me on twitter: @drupalninja
these docs are great! Thanks
these docs are great! Thanks for sharing them with others. Would you consider sharing them via Creative Commons so the Drupal Association can share them more broadly? I'm happy to post here on our website, too.
https://association.drupal.org/bizconnect/tools
Thanks,
Megan Sanicki
Associate Director
Drupal Assocation
Executive Director, Drupal Association
these docs are great! Thanks
these docs are great! Thanks for sharing them with others. Would you consider sharing them via Creative Commons so the Drupal Association can share them more broadly? I'm happy to post here on our website, too.
https://association.drupal.org/bizconnect/tools
Thanks,
Megan Sanicki
Associate Director
Drupal Association
Executive Director, Drupal Association