Contextual - Intranet Shoot-out: Plone vs. SharePoint

Intranet Shoot-out: Plone vs. Sharepoint
(The No-Kool-Aid Edition)

Ken Wasetis - Contextual
ken.wasetis@contextualcorp.com
twitter: @ctxlken
irc: ctxlken
www.contextualcorp.com

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Saturday, October 13, 12 1

Common Intranet Requirements

Make sharing files/content easier and web-based
Secure/shared areas for departments/groups
Handle large volume of MS Office/Adobe docs/files
Single Sign-On (no login prompt)
Support hundreds, or possibly thousands of logged-in users (Enterprise Intranet/Extranet)
Departmental web forms (trigger email, store some data, integrate with some other system)
Dashboard/Portal with Widgets/Portlets
Have tons of content to migrate into CMS

http://www.contextualcorp.com
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More Intranet Requirements
Custom Workﬂows with Flexible Assignment (by Content Type, by Context, etc.)
Strong tagging and search capabilities
Reporting/Analytics:
•Content Statistics (#Files, #Pages, #Images, #Edited in past 30 days)
•Editor/Content Manager Activity (#Created/Modified Items in past 90 days)
•Workflow/Content Quality Metrics (#Items Pending,Avg #Days in Pending, #Rejected, etc.)
Integration with Desktop Tools (Word, Excel, Outlook/Email, Exchange/Calendar)
Integration with other Enterprise Apps/DBs (PeopleSoft, Oracle, etc.)
Must Run on Windows!
Cool Web 2.0 Features
Check-in/Check-out / Versioning

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Still More Intranet Requirements

We Want a Wiki!
Must Have Collaboration (self-organizing, annotations, discussions)
Personalization (per-user; per-department; per-role)
Want to Design Workﬂows Graphically
Multilingual Capabilities
Budget
Miscellaneous Stuff:
•Generate barcoded PDFs from form data
•Weather portlet that displays weather for all locations
•Communicate to support team when staff start/end day, take breaks, etc.

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CMS Tools for Intranet: Short List

* MS Sharepoint
* Plone
Alfresco?
Liferay?

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Before We Continue
The following slides include comparisons by feature
between the Plone CMS and MS Sharepoint. The
strengths and weaknesses described for each tool
are not to be taken as the ﬁnal word on the
subject; they are indeed opinions. You should
install, prototype, and thoroughly evaluate both
tools on your own to see how you believe each
stacks up against the other in the requirement
areas of particular import to you and your
organization.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff...

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Sharing Files / Group Content

Sharepoint: Bread-and-butter as DMS
Plone: Natural, inherent feature

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SSO / Security / Auth
Sharepoint: Common to integrate with Active Directory
Only recently added ﬁle-level granular permissions/sharing and very limited
roles (read, contribute, design, full control)
Plone: I can do that too! And then some
•plone.app.ldap
•Web Server Auth
•SSPI Apache or IIS module
•Enfold Proxy, ISAPI_Rewrite, other filter to pass X_REMOTE_USER to Zope

Plone might actually have an edge here, as it supports many different authentication
models, and provides MUCH more fine-grained permissions management

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Performance

Sharepoint: Can handle load with SP/IIS/SQL/Windows ‘stack’
Plone: Me too, but with Apache + Plone caching (+ Varnish/Squid)

Query bottlenecks apply to both
CDN/Media cache headers apply to both
Can scale up and out on both

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Web Forms

Sharepoint: Strong Forms Capabilities; Especially Storing of Data
Plone: Very Flexible Forms through PloneFormGen

Comparison:
Easier to persist forms data with Sharepoint
Easier to trigger other events from forms in Plone (e.g., post to Salesforce or
ERP)

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Collaboration/Group/Dept Spaces

Sharepoint: ‘My Sites’ feature similar to KARL (self-organizing).
Poor model for user-generated content, since publishing is a one-way ‘push’
from source ‘staging’ system/site to target/published site.
(Old school publishing model.)

Plone: Variety of approaches (shared folders,
•No ‘self-organizing’ option
•Requires Admin to ‘share’ a folder to group of users before sharing happens

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Dashboard/Portal Interface
Sharepoint: Ships with numerous widgets to be laid-out as dashboard

Plone: Ships with a few built-in portlets, with ability to insert into preset
columns and on Dashboard page

Comparision: Both have portal/dashboard mechanisms.
•SP has had data visualization widgets for some time;
•Plone is ﬁnally getting some cool ones (thanks, EEA!)

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Content Migration
Sharepoint: ????

Plone: Many ways to approach migration
•FTP/WebDAV import
•CSV Import
•ODBC Connection to source + import scripts
•Transmogrifier pipeliones
•Funnelweb

Comparision: If migrating anything but files (office docs), Plone seems to make
migrations easier.

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Workflow
Sharepoint: WIth 2010, now supports workflow based on content type or
context

Plone: Has supported by-type and by-context (placeful) workflow for years

My Little WF Pony: Sharepoint offers ability to design WF graphically from
Visio (a common feature of traditional DMS tools.) This is more for
designing main ‘flow’ of states/transitions.

The promise of having non-techie design WF is rarely achieved, though.

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Search
Sharepoint: Includes FASTSearch

Plone: Built-in Search is better than most CMS tools

Comparison:
Both can convert/index office files
Need Plone + Solr to match FASTSearch (still achievable), configurable results
weightings, etc.
Plone offers simple vs. advanced options; Sharepoint requires more hardware
for FASTSearch.

15

Tagging

Sharepoint: In 2010, now offers metadata-based navigation

Plone: Has supported keyword tagging/meta-navigation and collections for
years.

Comparison:
Both tools offer custom content types, but seems easier to deﬁne in Plone.
Seems like MS is still catching up in area of ‘content reuse’ and not just
‘capturing’ metadata, but ‘doing something’ with it.

16

Reporting

Sharepoint: Built-in reporting and hooks into ‘Enterprise’ BI for advanced.

Plone: Lacks any decent reporting. Can easily plug-in web analytics tracking
code for 3rd-party tools, but no existing ‘roll-up’ data on #items in WF
states, content edits/mods over a period, average days pending, etc.

Comparison:
Sharepoint at least offers some reports, but more useful reports of ‘content
quality and CM activity’ can be done in Plone, with work.

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Integration with Desktop Apps
Sharepoint: Deep integration, not only to edit in Word/Excel, but Calendar/
Exchange,Visio/Workﬂows, Data Visualization widgets, ofﬂine editing/on-line
synching
Plone: External Editor offers edit/save-to-CMS from Word/Excel/OO/other.
PloneDesktop offers FTP/DAV with metadata editing. New data
visualization capabilities from EEA add-ons (upload new CSV, graphs are
updated.)

Comparison:
•Both offer good integration for editing/saving docs directly to CMS.
•Sharepoint gets edge for additional level of integration for calendar, data viz
widgets that can point to other data sources, etc.

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Integration with Enterprise Apps/DBs

Sharepoint: Some proprietary connectors ($); Ability for web services.

Plone: Few connectors (Salesforce, SugarCRM), but easier to build
integrations

Comparison:
Sharepoint offers custom integration options, but even experienced devs have
issues implementing. Seems like Plone can plug-and-play with about
anything, making custom connectors (PAS, web services, etc.) easier.

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Runs On Windows
Sharepoint: Of course it does.

Plone: Windows is actually #1 platform for evaluations. Some also deploy to
Windows for production, but this limits pool of support help a bit.

Comparison:
Both run on Windows, though most in Plone community will avoid Win-
speciﬁc support questions like the plague. STILL better than paid MS
support in some cases, though.

Plone on Windows is typically done on 32-bit (disadvantage).
This requirement usually is proven to not be requirement (shop does actually
support Linux for Oracle, Peoplesoft, Java apps, etc.)

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Personalization

Sharepoint: Doesn’t provide much OOB in this regard.

Plone: Role-based and Group-based portlets/dashboard; in-context
permissions/UI.

Comparison:
Plone is ahead in this area; doesn’t really even seem to be on MS radar.

21

Web 2.0 Features

Sharepoint: Is usually 2-3 years behind the curve. Case in point, current
version is SP 2010.

Plone: Frequent, incremental releases of new improved features. Cases in
point: check-in/out, versioning, discussions, portlets.
Open source tools in general are the ﬁrst to port trendy/cool Web 2.0
features, such as slideshows, social network integrations/sharing, etc.

Comparison:
Plone is ahead in this area and things aren’t likely to change.

22

Multilingual Capabilities

Sharepoint: CMS UI supports it. Managing i18n content not that simple

Plone: CMS UI and i18n content well-supported.

Comparison:
Plone actually probably holds a little edge here, from our experience.

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Budget
Sharepoint: Requires signiﬁcantly more budget for Sharepoint, SQL Server,
FASTSearch,Visual Studio IDE, etc. License fees alone could range $50K -
$500K for ‘Enterprise’ version and features, if org has 1,000+ users.

Plone: To enable ‘Enterprise’ features, such as AD or Solr advanced search,
custom integration connectors, an ‘Enterprise’ Intranet project can take
more effort than a run-of-the-mill Plone project.

Comparison:
Even with additional effort to enable ‘Enterprise’ features of Plone, costs are
signiﬁcantly lower with Plone, in our experience.
Some clients have false notion that ‘Sharepoint is basically free for us’, since we
already standardize on SQL, SP, etc.
See cost calculator: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010-price-calculator/default.aspx

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Examples of Easier Integration with Plone
OS-level system calls to Java app that merges data into PDF, generates
barcode, returns and emails ﬁle to customer from Plone
Current Weather/Forecast Portlet - integrated with wunderground.org
Custom Terms-of-Acceptance form-signing upon viewing site.
Custom ‘Breaking News’ lightbox effect alert
Custom web services integration with CA ServiceDesk ticketing system
All of above developed by staff with 1 year on Plone and Python, with only
some consultant assistance

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Conclusions?
Typical Consultant Answer: It Depends on Your Requirements

Both tools are capable or even strong in most areas. Each tool is stronger in
some areas than the other, so an organization should intelligently evaluate
both tools, determine critical requirements, and select a tool.

•There is no clear-cut better tool, based solely on feature set.
•TCO should be considered, not just cost of initial implementation. What are
options/costs of customizing/extending? Will we need to?
•Even though Plone / open source option isn’t without any cost, it is still far
more affordable.
•While .Net devs are more abundant than Python devs, Sharepoint requires
special integration expertise. Finding ‘expert’ consultants/employees on any
sophisticated CMS can be a challenge.

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Conclusions?

Sharepoint is a poor ﬁt as a WCM; better at DMS needs
Plone is more well-rounded and handles the behind-the-scenes stuff, as well as
offering the latest ﬂashy AJAX ‘creature features’ users crave.
You think Plone is bloated? Ha! Take a good look at SP.
Buildout gives Plone a better deployment story across servers
“Still feels and behaves like a document collaboration system”
-- Real Story Group

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Ken Wasetis
ken.wasetis@contextualcorp.com
twitter . irc . skype: ctxlken

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Contextual - Intranet Shoot-out: Plone vs. SharePoint

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