A SharePoint intranet or not?

That is the question; particularly, when you are considering the best intranet solution for your business.

Recently, at Avvio we have successfully won competitive pitches to deliver SharePoint intranets, but is that always the answer? In these instances it most definitely was - the benefits of SharePoint far outweighed the risks. 

We believe in offering the right solution for the challenge. And here SharePoint offered ease of integration with the existing system, no need for additional licensing, faster to build with updates and functionality easily added as time goes on. The trick though is to ensure complete user adoption, so we also recommended a communication strategy to ensure effective uptake and use.

Now, if we had received a different brief, we may have come up with a different solution. And let’s face it there are a plethora of choices when you are looking at having the ability to empower people to contribute content to a website without an ‘IT bod’ having to do all the technical work. 

For instance, WordPress may primarily be a blog tool and while somewhat different in principle to SharePoint (and vastly different in architecture and infrastructure) they both share the notion of delivering a user driven content site.  In fact you can just as easily accomplish most of what you can do in WordPress as you can in SharePoint and vice versa.

So, it is not a question of one being right and the other wrong, more a question of which fits the challenge, budget and addresses the primary needs and objective of the intranet.

Blog Posted by: Rachel on 20/10/2011

Back