You know you want SharePoint, but there are so many choices. How do you start? What do you need to know?
Original image credit: dilbert.com
Here are just a few of the choices you’ll need to think about:
- SharePoint Foundation, vs. SharePoint Standard vs. SharePoint Enterprise
- What’s the difference?
- What do we need?
- How much will it cost?
- Single server vs. farm deployment
- What if the server goes down?
- What is a SharePoint farm?
- Deploy SharePoint to bare-metal or virtualize
- What if the hardware fails?
- How do we upgrade the hardware?
- Which virtual infrastructure should we use?
- Central deployment vs. regional or branch office deployment
- Can everyone connect to the central deployment?
- Can we get rid of the VPN?
- Who’s going to troubleshoot SharePoint in the branch offices if there’s a problem?
- On premises SharePoint vs. hosted SharePoint vs. SharePoint in the cloud
- Host with whom?
- Which cloud?
- Are people going to have to remember yet another username / password?
Unfortunately there is no “paint by numbers” or “silver bullet” solution. The important thing to remember is that the decision is about weighing the trade-offs. Each choice has its pros and cons, and what might be a pro to one organization might be a con for you.
The best advice I can give you is to start small. Rather than deploying to your entire organization, deploy to a department, or better yet to a small workgroup. Getting SharePoint in place doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. This post shows how to set up SharePoint for 500 users for $1,100 with no monthly fees. SharePoint in the cloud can be a good way to go too, but there are many things that SharePoint cloud companies don’t tell you, like it might be cheaper for you to host SharePoint internally. Want to speak fact-to-face to real people about SharePoint? Start by attending a local SharePoint users group. Our own Boston Area SharePoint User Group meets the second Wednesday of each month in Cambridge, MA. Attendance is FREE.