[Evangelism] Re: Sharepoint vs. Plone

[Nate Aune]

Idea to create whitepaper from Plone and Sharepoint stories. See
http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/plone-vs-sharepoint

> A great idea Nate!  Just to point out to those that mgiht not have seen it
> yet, my blog post from Internet World:
>
> http://www.netsight.co.uk/blog/2009/5/1/plone-at-internet-world-expo

Yes, great post!

> I had a couple of people come by the stand and look at the brochure, and
> when I approched them they said 'oh we use microsfot technology...' or 'oh
> we are going to use sharepoint'.  I think the key is to really show users
> that Plone vs Sharepoint is like Apples vs Oranges.  They really are
> different beasts.  I normally start by telling people that they can co-exist
> together and really serve slightly different functions.   The people I
> showed demos to of Plone at the expo really were blown away by the
> flexibility of Plone and what can be achieve with it.

Yes, it's not fair to compare the two systems because they are
fundamentally targeting different use cases, but one cannot deny that
Plone's feature set overlaps a lot with what Sharepoint provides, and
vice versa.

> I think they biggest thing to get over, is as Karl says in his Blog post,
> that in corporate-land deploying Sharepoint comes under a central IT budget.
>  Even if the costs are higher (which is another topic... people think it is
> 'free') the end department that wants it is rarely the one that pays for it.

Good point. I came across this SaaS cost savings calculator which
might be useful for getting a good overview of what traditional
"on-premise" software from the likes of Microsoft, Lotus, etc. costs
an organization depending on how many users they have.
http://www.phase2.com/savings/

Nate

p.s. cc'ing the evangelism list since others might want to join in on
this conversation.

-- 
Nate Aune - natea at jazkarta.com
Sign up for Plone Developer training on the Amalfi Coast of Italy (5/11-12).
http://plonedev-natesig.eventbrite.com