SharePoint versus DocuShare
Jerry F
been sold on the idea of DocuShare, but we already own Small Business Server
2003 and SQL Server and Sharepoint. I would like to explore the idea of
using SharePoint instead of DocuShare.
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Jerry
Kevin Weilbacher
experience and/or comparison. I'll let him know you're asking.
--
Kevin Weilbacher [SBS-MVP]
"The days pass by so quickly now, the nights are seldom long"
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Jerry F
--
Jerry
Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]
(like directories - collections contain documents, calendars, or whatever)
and 70,000 documents. We've been using DocuShare for about 5 years.
Unfortunately, because we started out with DS before SharePoint existed,
most of my experience is with that. I have not used SharePoint much, but
more importantly, I don't have any experience with a SharePoint installation
that compares in size to our DocuShare install.
Several things come to mind on this topic, and I'll give them to you in no
particular order:
- DocuShare is kind of expensive, and IMO you should have it on an annual
support contract with Xerox. The cost depends on license quantity and
features. A rough guess is that you'd be looking in the low 5 figures for
the software, plus a few thousand per year in support. You should be able
to easily get a quote for exact figures.
- DocuShare paid support is truly excellent, but there is no peer support I
am aware of at all. That said, if you're on a contract with Xerox, you can
just as easily call them for support anyway. There is no 24x7 support, it's
weekdays until 7 eastern (I think).
- We run DocuShare on its own hardware, and it's pretty beefy hardware
(Xeon, 2 GB ram, hardware raid). Unless you're planning a pretty low volume
installation, DocuShare will not be happy sharing hardware, particularly
with SBS. I used to run it on a low-volume file and print server along with
the accounting software and a few other small apps, but since version 3, the
hardware requirements are higher and I'm happier with it on its own box.
- It's my impression that DS is simpler for users to learn right out of the
box than SharePoint, both for users and admins. Xerox designed it to be
self-teaching, so that a new user could just go to the home page and get
instructions, configure her own account, add content - just start working
with no training. Of course you can tighten up the security much more than
that if you wish.
- SharePoint appears to have much more granular control over security. For
example, DS has a group called "content managers" who can work with other
people's documents (delete, undelete, etc.). Content managers can not be
blocked from viewing anything in DS. So by making someone a content manager
to save you those minor admin duties, you lose your ability to keep selected
content private from that person.
- With SharePoint, depending on your abilities you can change the appearance
with built in features, frontpage, etc. With DocuShare, pages are created
on the fly using XML-based templates. So you need to know XML if you want
to change how things display from the defaults. I'm working with 3rd party
consultants to customize templates for my upgrade to DS 4, something I'd be
doing in-house if it were SharePoint.
I wish I knew more about SharePoint so I could give you a better comparison.
However, what I would strongly urge you to do is either go to the DocuShare
web site and sign up for a demo account on Xerox's server, or download and
install the trial version. The demo account idea is simpler - they'll give
you a username and password for one collection that you can play with as
much as you wish.
The trial version is supposed to be installed on a server. When version 3
came out, I installed it on my XP desktop with a 3ghz P4 and 512 MB ram. It
was really slow, and it's unsupported on a workstation (Xerox was amazed it
even worked). I had to install IIS for it too. Point being, if you want to
try it without doing a server install, you could give it a try on your
desktop. They may have put in a block for XP since I did my tests, but it's
worth a try if you don't have a server available.
You'll have to sign up for either the trial or the demo, but in my
experience, they're not going to start torturing you with sales calls so
that's nothing to worry about.
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