Comparison: SharePoint/Joomla/Drupal 1

[MasterRacker]

If you were setting up an intranet with an eye toward and eventual added extranet in a Windows shop, which would you choose and why: A)SharePoint B)Joomla using WAMP or C) Drupal using WAMP? (I'm quite certain that SharePoint is the most expensive solution, so I'm interested in other factors such as ease of delegation of content creation/mgmt, administrative management, etc.)

Disclaimer: I did also post this in the CMS forum, but that is a very small forum with almost no activity and since this is about an overall site framework, this seems a valid place to post - so pardon the double post.

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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[Foamcow]

Not used Drupal but I hear good things. Is it really the sort of thing you need though?

Sharepoint. My experience is limited but that's because I didn't think much of it. Again, depends on what you want to do with it.

Joomla! Once built an intranet with Joomla! Never again.


Out of interest why not look for another solution? Something like Community Server (

http://communityserver.com/)

or Umbraco (

http://www.umbraco.org/)

for instance. There are some other nice looking ASP.NET based CMS out there that I would definitely look at over any of your options.

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[MasterRacker]

OK - for more details. This would be for municipal site for a small city. Basic intranet functionality allowing departmental sites for delegated content management of policies, procedures, record keeping, etc. Eventually we would possibly extend to an extranet allowing citizens access to publicly available information, look up utility bills, someday do e-commerce for online bill pay, etc. Blogs, forums, etc. are unnecessary. Automated document workflow, via Outlook/Exchange and other methods will factor in large in the future.

A number of our nearby peers are using Joomla which is why it's on the short list. Researching Joomla, I came across a number of posts preferring Drupal. I found a list of over 500 CMSs and of course can't even begin to evaluate them all. I have taken a brief look at DotNetNuke, page design part at least, it looks very similar to SharePoint.

For my part my biggest concerns with SharePoint cost, complexity and embedding all content inside a database. I've seen endless posts in support forums suggesting that even "simple" customizations are actually difficult to accomplish and can break the app.

Foamcow, Out of my curiosity, what are some of the things in Joomla that gave you problems?


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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[Stretchwickster]

I've had limited experience of Content Management Systems, but have used Drupal for a short time, and it's fairly straightforward to use. But I have nothing to compare it to.

Before choosing Drupal, I stumbled across a good site for CMS comparison:

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Clive

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[Foamcow]

I don't know if a newer version of Joomla has changed things but I found it very restrictive. Basically you are stuck with a preset navigational structure - Section/Category/Article.

My client wanted to do some things in a different way which meant the use of multiple plugins and some customisation on my part. This led me to think that I'd probably have been better off just building it all from scratch.

Part of the problem was to do with, shall we say, haphazard project plannning but much of it was a limitation of Joomla.

Don't get me wrong. It's a great system if a little over complex in parts. But it's not anywhere near as flexible as some might think.

From reading more on your requirements I think you may be better off working with something more like a development framework rather than a CMS.

Two more products you could look at that fit this model a little better would be Plone and Typo3. I've only looked at these in a brief manner but they did seem more like tools you'd use build a site with custom CMS capabilities rather than a CMS solution in the way Joomla is.

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Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
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[smah]

Even though we should head over to forum1246, I'll throw in a vote for Modx. I personally think that it's far less restrictive than either Joomla or Drupal.

 

[MasterRacker]

smah, I stared over there but there are 1000 members vs 11000 here and that forum has almost no traffic whereas we're having a good conversation here. (of course, you guys keep throwing yet another one at me to look at. ;-) )

I guess one other requirement that's occured to me is if I delegate sub-site management to power users in various departments they need to be able to manage content and possibly develop pages without ever seeing HTML and I probably wont have budget for a tool like Expression or Dreamweaver.

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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[smah]

I don't know if you're aware, but you can experiment with many open source cms systems for up to 2 hours at a time (reset frequency) at

http://www.opensourcecms.com

If you actually want something sharepoint-like, also consider Alfresco.

 

[kjv1611]

My vote may not count for much, but I personally love Drupal. I don't even fully know how to tweak all the code and all, but I was able to transfer our entire church site fairly quickly. Also, I've been able to add functionalities much quicker and easier than I ever imagined possible.

Our current church site:

http://www.parkwoodbaptistchurch.us

Everything there, except for the calendar, is specifically Drupal. We even just stuck with the default theme so far, as it seems to fit nicely with what I wanted it to look like anyway - for now.

Sometimes, it can be a headache in some ways, but I've yet to come across any technology that doesn't produce some headaches at some point.

One thing for sure is you need to have at least one dedicated person who can keep up with udpates to the site in order to make sure security udpates are up to date, or at least close to timely.

I did find some other sites - more municipal and school site s that served as Intranets and Extranets, I believe, which seemed to run REALLY well with Drupal.

Where I work, we use SharePoint. I have no involvement in the development, but I will say I think it is requiring far more resources in personnel and certainly money than any Drupal install would require.

One possible negative with Drupal I have found is that the forum support structure doesn't seem to be as helpful as some others. I could be wrong, but it seems difficult to get answers quickly. Then again, perhaps I'm expecting too much after dealing mostly with tek-tips for so long.

Also, there are lots of good references outside of

http://drupal.org

and

http://groups.drupal.org

available. One for looking at available modules is

http://drupalmodules.com/

- I like the layout there, and it has good bits of information, reviews, ratings, etc.

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[MasterRacker]

So far, I'm coming to the conclusion that SharePoint is not really a web "content" management system, but rather is a document management system with a web based front end. The one benefit I'm seeing is that it appears to be easy to delegate departmental subsite management to non IT types. I don't know if it's worth the cost for that though.

Comments on my impressions so far?

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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[ggriffit]

If you are doing this for work, which it seems you are, then why not take a look at the Enterprise ones recommended by the likes of Gartner etc such as Livelink and Documentum ?

Greg Griffiths
Livelink Certified Developer & ECM Global Star Champion 2005 & 2006

http://www.greggriffiths.org/livelink/