All these years that I have been writing about SharePoint, it has been hard to pin down the exact costs of SharePoint. One thing is for sure, that it is a whopping cardiac arrest evoking figure, as SharePoint cost calculators like the following from Bamboo Nation shall testify. However, it has been hard to ever set a specific figure, as you can with cloud based SharePoint alternatives - $10/user/month.

The main reason for this is that there are simply so many parameters, especially if you are considering the real, total cost of hosting and managing your own SharePoint. These are the following:

- Do you already have Windows Server, and Windows Server Client Licenses? If not, you would need to include that cost.

- Do you already have SQL server? If not add that too. 

- Add the cost of SharePoint Server.

- Will you be using standard client access licenses or enterprise client accesses licenses?

- Will you be using it for internet facing sites?

- Will you be using FAST enterprise search server?

- How much IT staff time have you allocated to SharePoint management? How much are you paying your staff?

- Do you also want to allocate some hardware costs to SharePoint? 

 As you can see, given all the variables, it is a tall order to estimate SharePoint costs. However, we have been saved this effort by Osterman Research, which recently did a survey on SharePoint, and came up with an "average" cost of on premise SharePoint for organizations per user per month - $30. Although this may not be the specific amount a company pays out, considering all the variables, it does give companies a ballpark figure to use in their cost comparisons.

So compare Sharepoint with cloud based collaboration software alternatives to Sharepoint - $30 vs $10 user/month. What is your choice? 

Osterman Research just published a study titled "“SharePoint Census 2011 – State of the Market” tracking SharePoint usage behaviors in mid to large sized organizations. Getting right into it, here are some of the key findings of the study:

- Downtime. Enterprises where unplanned SharePoint downtime was caused by administrator error experienced 72 percent more outages, and paid twice as much per user per month to manage the platform. Among these organizations, 43 percent cited lack of administrator skills, training, and knowledge as an inhibitor to efficiently leveraging SharePoint. This is indicative of the complexity of managing SharePoint.  

- Costs. It was  found that the average cost of managing SharePoint was close to $30 per user per month. Compare this with the $10 per user per month for cometing web based SharePoint alternatives.

- Deployment Method. The study found that 80% of SharePoint servers are deployed on premises. Respondents of the study anticipate that this will fall to 55%, while the rest will be accounted for by SharePoint based on the private cloud (35%) and the public cloud (15%). I think this is indicative of the fact that large companies with enhanced security concerns account for a big section of SharePoint's customers. 

Info Tech Research Group just published a study on the vendor landscape in the collaboration platform market. From my point of view, it is more than a vendor roundup, but one of the most comprehensive studies about the collaboration market in a while, and was much needed. The report covers all aspects of implementing a collaboration software platform and includes primary research as well. The following are some highlights and findings of the study:

- SharePoint is implemented in 78% of the organizations

- Social collaboration tools such as employee profiles and activity streams are in high demand.

- Collaboration platforms have evolved from being document centric to network centric 

The study covers three types of vendors, each of which are applicable to a different business environment - SharePoint, SharePoint Alternatives like HyperOffice, and Sharepoint plugins like NewsGator.   

The report is a must read for anyone who wishes to consider implementing a collaboration platform in their organization, or wish to understand the collaboration market. 

Ever since Microsoft has got its darling new child - Office 365, customers of its previous cloud collaboration software - BPOS - have been treated like orphans. They took faith in Microsoft's cloud promises and become early users of Microsoft's cloud solution. Things have been hard, with persistent downtime issues in recent times and over the years. However, hope kept them going. They were given promises of great things in the future. Of BPOS being modernized and being made a true cloud solution. A solution that was easy to use and set up, fully integrated, which promised to sky rocket productivity. 

And then Office 365 was introduced, with all of Microsoft's pomp and hoopla right behind it.  Ah, finally the moment BPOS customers had been waiting for had arrived.

Only, BPOS users were not eligible to be moved to Office 365. Microsoft will start moving the first batch of customers in September 2011, but to transition them all, it could take as long as September 2012. Thats a helluva long time in business terms.

Loyalty is obviously not rewarded in the Microsoft world.

That is why you should stick to a Microsoft alternative.  

I came across a very interesting article on Informationweek today. The article is about JP Morgan Chase, which is not just using SharePoint for collaboration, but using two instances of SharePoint in parallel. Talk about all the efforts of us "SharePoint alternative" evangelists being futile. 

One's first reaction to this would be that JP Morgan loves SharePoint so much that it cant get enough of it. But the implementation deserves a closer look. Earlier, JP Morgan has been using SharePoint 2007 across its 200,000 large, globally scattered workforce. Over this period it has accumulated a whopping 4,000 "site collections" centralized in one giant SharePoint farm. Sometime in 2009, the IT team for JP started looking for options to add "social" collaboration features to their solution. 

They decided to go with SharePoint 2010, and build a "social" solution for the company ground up. But they never scrapped SharePoint 2007. The reason given by Mike Aaron Brown, the spearhead of the effort was, "Building a separate system for community and social functionality allows us to establish the ground rules around legal, risk and compliance that come with being in a heavily regulated industry". Sound like a lame reason to me. The real reason, quite apparently was the fact that moving 4,000 site collections from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 would simply have proved to be two disruptive.

At some point JP is bound to realize that data in the "social communities" in SharePoint 2010 and the "site collections" in SharePoint 2007 is intersecting and overlapping. Having it in separate silos simply creates redundancies and bottlenecks.  

Consider an alternate scenario. If JP had been on a web based SharePoint alternative, features and functionality would have been contnuously updated and added in response to market changes. The "social" features that Brown wants would already have been readily available in the same solution, not requiring any disruptive "upgrade". 

Another reason why the cloud rocks and on-prem sucks.