I often help prospective customers decide whether or not they should implement SharePoint or an alternate product. Not long ago the choice was fairly simple, but now there are many options: Drupal, DotNetNuke, Oracle Web Center, Web Logic, Alfresco, and Documentum just to name a few. And what about the cloud and hosted service offerings like Box.net and even SharePoint Online? An organization can devote a lot of time and money trying to figure things out and end up just going in circles.
No Features Comparisons
The most common mistake I’ve seen organizations make in trying to determine whether SharePoint is right for them is diving directly into product feature comparisons. When my customers need to compare applications, I recommend that they DO NOT do a direct features comparison. Features comparisons can take a substantial amount of time and provide very little information about each product’s suitability to the task. Determining suitability to the customer’s tasks is what the customer really needs.
Use Cases
Instead of starting with a feature comparison, I recommend that the customer put some time into generating a list (10-20) of use cases or usage scenarios that they need a product to enable. Once you have the list, you can now do a comparison between the products in the context of the use cases. This method provides a good way to see which product features are actually relevant to your needs and which features, while sounding good, are just fluff. To make the final comparison easier, I recommend assigning a value to each product’s support for a use case indicating how well the product implements the use case. Use the relevant features as supporting statements or proof for the assigned value.
Operational Impact
Once you have the product comparison in the context of the use cases (the functional comparison), you need to do a non-functional or operational comparison between the products. The goal of the non-functional comparison is to determine the organizational impact of each product. For example,
- How does each product handle scaling, load balancing, fail-over?
- What backup / recovery models does each product support?
- How does each product handle security and identity management?
- To what extent does each product integrate with and extend the customer’s existing infrastructure (on-premises or hosted)?
- What resources (human and non-human) does the sustainment team for each product consist of?
- What are the up-front and ongoing costs of each product (hardware, LAN bandwidth, WAN bandwidth, licensing, 3rd-party tools, consulting services, etc)?
Where’s the Value?
Combining the functional and non-functional comparisons of each product allows you to ultimately reach a value comparison between each product. The value comparison should be the determining factor in deciding on one product or service vs. another.