SharePoint Alternative

There are easier and cheaper solutions

Identifying a SharePoint alternative:

SharePoint alternatives depend on your needs and technical constraints. If your goal is a simple collaboration tool, services such as Box.net are able to offer similar functionality without the cost or set-up requirements. With Box.net or similar services, you can easily share files online, create online workspaces, start online discussions, track progress on projects and more. The advantage of most SharePoint alternative’s is that they are web based, which means as your company or workgroup grows in size, the amount of resources needed to support this increase scales automatically. A SharePoint server requires hardware upgrades to support increases in storage utilization and more users.

Costs for a SharePoint alternative:

Cost reductions are dramatic when comparing an online service such as Box.net to s self-hosted SharePoint license and server. With just 5 users, a SharePoint install can cost as much as $16,900 a year. Box.net starts at just $15 a year per user, and offers a free account for those not interested in our business features.

Why would someone switch to a SharePoint alternative?

One reason would be to avoid having to maintain a SharePoint install. If a SharePoint server fails, repairs could take days or weeks, hurting productivity for everyone that uses the collaboration tools. Further, if a disk has a permanent error, data may be unrecoverable. Because SharePoint is expensive enterprise software, specialists will have to be contacted, potentially causing further delays.

Online services like Box.net use multiple geographically diverse servers to ensure multiple file backups at all times. With multiple servers, even if a server were to malfunction, the others will allow the service to continue, preventing any work interruptions.