Sharepoint - A review and better understanding

Microsoft Sharepoint is by far the most widespread form of intranet worldwide. It is therefore natural that other suppliers of intranets apply Sharepoint as an additional word to their own SharePoint services. Eg." We are an alternative to Sharepoint", or "our solution is like Sharepoint , only much better".

To understand these alternatives, it makes sense to gain an understanding of what the difference is on Sharepoint and many of the alternative intranet services which are based on e.g. content management systems.

Sharepoint on premise, Sharepoint Online and Modern Sharepoint are also concepts covered in this article.

What is Sharepoint?

When Microsoft itself describes Sharepoint, it is described as a service that organizations can use to create websites. According to Wikipedia, a web-based knowledge sharing and document management portal, Microsoft Sharepoint is a gathering place for sharing information. You can use it to construct web pages where you can exchange information with others and collaborate with others on documents, as well as access specialized web parts such as blogs and forums.

Alternative solutions can therefore easily postulate that they can do the same as Sharepoint, only much better. An example was when Sharepoint was launched. The flexibility back then could be compared to when Ford Motor offered any color on the cars as long as buyers chose a black car.

It was therefore easy for players who developed intranet solutions in Content Management Systems to create significantly more inviting and dynamic intranet solutions that better corresponded to the customers' identity and design wishes. However, only as long as the need was only a login for limited grouped content, e.g. blogs and forums, the level was very parallel.

Sharepoint is more than just grouped content

Where Sharepoint differentiates itself from most other intranet platforms is especially in the organization of content and especially file and document management, where it is connected to other Office products such as Word and Excel.

Whereas Sharepoint functions as a personalized document management system where the content is targeted to the user, the same option is rarely experienced in other intranet platforms. Here, file and document management is often limited to group level and not individual level.  

An example of where this can be expressed is when access control is divided at group level, e.g. according to the organizational chart, but where employees compete in several defined roles such as committee work, trade union representative and safety representative, where the user must work both on line, staff and across the organization. Content management systems are basically made for publishing content to one or a few recipient groups, and not made for document management. Which leads to the next huge challenge – searching for content based on the user's given situation and needs.

Why old-fashioned directory structures are no match for an effective search engine

When the system does not "know the user", but only the users in group form, how can the content be targeted to the individual?

Since the content is often stored in old-fashioned folder structures in a CMS system, and grouped according to access by user groups, the search will often end up in conflict with rules for access control and thus erroneous or inaccurate search results.

A supplementary search engine is offered for the alternative intranet solutions, which can search for content across the many file archives, but it requires a lot of effort to get those services to function optimally. In Sharepoint, the search engine is part of the system, not a 3rd party system.

The same challenge arises when, for example, Office programs are linked to create what the market calls a digital workplace . It quickly ends with the alternative intranet becoming a cluster solution with various 3rd party applications that must talk to each other. Microsoft 365 services USA has therefore understood the importance of integrating access control, document management, other applications and search engine in one and the same system -  Office365 .