Why Alfresco? How Sharepoint maybe worth every dollar spent for custom development in Microsoft .NET

Why Alfresco? How Sharepoint maybe worth every dollar spent for custom development in Microsoft .NET

Sharepoint development may be worth the money if you think it is too much?

The first session at Toronto Code Camp 2010 I went was Reza Alirezaei who has developed with Sharepoint 2010 from Microsoft. Reza is also an architect over at Canadian Tire and seems to be pretty well seasoned in Sharepoint developer and architect.

Reza’s session mostly focused on the high level of how Sharepoint works and some of the newer features of Sharepoint. I have developed with a competitive product called Alfresco which is Java and painful Javascript based. The newer version of Sharepoint makes Alfresco look like it came from the dark ages with its set of very limited APIs (application programming interface) which communicate both with Java and Javascript. I must personally say it is quire backwards with very little documentation and community support.

When you compare the SharePoint’s online documentation and community support. Reza also show us (the audience) some of the third party support available from the Sharepoint and Microsoft. The biggest gripe against Sharepoint is its licensing of $300000 fee of licensing for roughly thousand users. Alfresco brags to be around $40,000. Fine but when you look the services and what you can leverage from both platforms, I now see why Sharepoint might be worth the money. Anyhow, most purchasers of Sharepoint will be Fortune 500 types. Believe me, these kind of companies can afford while the little small business who are more budget conscious would go with Alfresco.

As Sharepoint is based on Microsoft’s .NET technology which obviously focuses on Windows servers. When you compare the languages available, it is a huge development community available compared to lame old archaic Alfresco. This will make a huge difference in your development experience with Sharepoint versus Alfresco. Why would you want to work with an older script language like Javascript? Yuck!