Alternatives to Sharepoint

What Are the Best Known SharePoint Alternatives?

SharePoint is already considered a standard for business collaborative software packages, for document and project management, as well as intranets and extranets. However, it is not the only one that can be used for all or some of the above. While SharePoint is the largest and most comprehensive solution you can find at this time, there are SharePoint alternatives that are a bit lighter. Here are some of them.

Alfresco

Alfresco is a document management solution that offers businesses a few great tools in promoting productivity and better management. Like SharePoint, it create workflow templates, it allows for paperless communication, and it provides mobile support. However, it must be noted that Alfresco only provides only 10GB of content management in the cloud for free, which may be way too little for many businesses. Also, Alfresco is not as extensive as SharePoint when it comes to intranets and extranets capabilities.

HyperOffice

HyperOffice focuses more on collaboration tools. Promoting employee collaboration, it seems to come equipped with everything that is needed from such a tool. It allows business owners to create intranets in order to increase collaboration within the company, and it has several document management features that companies cannot live without today like storing files and making them shareable. Email hosting and mobile support are readily provided, as well. If compared with SharePoint, it is less capable in regards to search functionalities, as well as abilities to create new tools for increasing business productivity.

Podio

Podio promotes itself as a virtual workspace. It acts pretty much like a social media platform where people can work together as a team. In many ways, Podio looks like a social media network, where employees from the same company can gather together to share the same workspace, post comments, check the status of other team members, and receive feedback. However, as a solution that focuses more of the workspace and less on management, Podio is less capable than SharePoint, so it may not be ideal for large companies that need to deal with more complex requirements, such as web applications, extranets, and elaborate search functionalities.

Kerio

Kerio is a place for sharing files and working together. These two activities represent the basis for collaborative work, and since all is carried out online, in the cloud, one can easily see the benefits for a business that can be drawn this way. Kerio comes equipped with some very nice features, such as security solutions, mobile support – for companies that need to get their updates fast to their team members – and easy administration. Still, it is not of the same caliber as SharePoint, as it has less collaborative features, and it does not come up with programming capabilities as the Microsoft product.

TWiki

Twiki is another light solution for creating a virtual workspace and managing projects online. It does pretty much all the major things that SharePoint does, such as allowing for document sharing, promoting easy project management, creating intranets, and developing web applications. However, it must be noted that TWiki is just a lighter alternative, and one cannot expect it to have the same complex capabilities SharePoint comes with. It can be used as a knowledge based platform in order to develop new projects but it is not as secure as SharePoint.

Conclusion

SharePoint is considered the absolute leader for business solutions in regards to document and project management, virtual workspaces, intranets, extranets, web apps and the list can continue. Its complex structure is particularly adequate for large companies, but small companies should not overlook it either. Security issues are not too be taken lightly, especially when operating in the cloud with sensitive documents, and SharePoint is one of those systems that takes security on the Internet to a whole new level.