1

I would like as unbiased opinion as possible on costs, maintenance and features. Also what if you already have some sharepoint sites up, does it make sense to expand the sharepoint installation rather than move to box.net in that case? What is transfering like? Which would you pick and why? I am leaning towards box.net, but "nobody got fired for choosing IBM"(MS sharepoint in this case)

user14939
  • 119
  • 3

2 Answers2

4

We have Sharepoint at work and I am the primary Admin for it as well so I know it pretty well. Honestly, there are a lot of features in Sharepoint that make it ideal for a corporate network, although it has it's downsides as well. I think the biggest downside is the learning curve for customizing and developing for it.

Box.net is pretty cool (I have also used BaseCamp for similar types of team collaboration) and they get the job done, but I think when dealing with a corporate infrastructure, having things hosted internally is a really big plus, regardless of the privacy promises that are made on these types of service sites.

As far as migration, that's going to be a big headache because as far as I can tell from Box, there is no automatic way to migrate. You can probably pay someone to do it for you, but depending on the amount of content you have this could be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for the work, maybe more.

If you already have Sharepoint and arent completely unhappy with it, I would stick to it. Sharepoint is pretty low maintenance usually once you have it set up initially and it can pretty much run itself if you are using it just for an intranet collaboration suite. If you are using it for a much more custom role then that may change.

Starting out from scratch, I might try and find something else, perhaps even something like Alfresco: http://www.alfresco.com/products/collaboration/ which is open source, but if you already have sharepoint up and running, I would stick to it unless you encounter challenges that can't be overcome. Just keep in mind, if you have a really sharp .net developer on your team, most challenges should be pretty easy to take on.

tcnolan
  • 432
  • 2
  • 12
0

We've been using Box.net for about 2 months. We use it for hosting images for our clients.

Our customers need to be able to search and select multiple images for download. With Box.net, at this time, they can't. If they search for certain items and come up with a list of things to download, when they try to download, they get a message that they can only download folders or individual images.

Also, Box.net displays image thumbnails...about 100/page. We have thousands of images so we multiple pages to click through. You can click and draw a box around the images you want to select but there's no way to "Ctrl Click" to select multiples. You can also click individual images but if you need hundreds of images to download, this is VERY slooooow.

Are there any good CMS systems that focus on image hosting with browser-based interface?