Feb 25th, 2009 |
Ingres and Alfresco have teamed to create an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s SharePoint platform for document collaboration and management. The Linux-based appliance joins Alfresco’s ECM with Ingres’ database services. Alfresco has long positioned itself as a lower-cost offering that also offers the extensibility of open-source.
We continue to see strong adoption rates for application sharing platforms with approximately 80% of our recent “Unified Communications and Collaboration” benchmark depoying or planning to deploy such applications. Among those we interviewed, SharePoint holds a commanding market share, but we continue to hear concerns around cost and complexity of deployment, which in the current economic environment presents an opportunity for lower cost alternatives to gain market share.
We also see document collaboration products serving as the basis for adoption of enterprise social networking systems such as Telligent’s Community Server and IBM Lotus’s Connections. There’s no mention yet of social networking services as part of the Ingres-Alfresco announcement, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the eventual integration of an open source social networking server.
well for large companies it doesn’t really matter since they often have all sharepoint licenses anyway. surprisingly a lot of have them and don’t do anything with it
even more, with the sharepoint 14 coming up, sharepoint suddenly becomes much more than a document management platform
(and no i am not working for microsoft ;-) just telling what i see from working at a large system’s integrator)
lee
I work for a 5000+ user company who does not have MS Sharepoint or much in the way of Microsoft in the back office at all (other than SQL Server Ent). We evaluated Sharepoint and were shocked to discover that an enterprise solution )SW + Implementation) would run us around $1M. Needless to say, in this economy, that’s just not going to happen.
We began looking at Alfresco four months ago and quickly discovered that their CPU pricing and rich functionality/ extensibility were a good match for us.
With the number of enterprises now looking at Open Source as a viable alternative… MS had better go back to the drawing board with their pricing model.
Alfresco is another example of high productivity, low cost, OPEN tools that are catching companies like Microsoft and IBM/Lotus off guard……
I couldn’t be more pleased with Alfresco’s capabilities and open architecture.
CB
You should try: liferay http://www.liferay.com
Maybe this website can help you:
http://www.sharepointalternative.org
Its always nice to see increased competition in the space, but it will probably be awhile before its seen as a serious competitor to any of the current enterprise platforms.
SharePoint can have a very low entry cost as a workgroup solution, and doesn’t have to be expensive even in a large scale environment. I can’t imagine how complex a $1M implementation would be, but 5000 user can be supported reliably for much less.
check out the Sharepoint alternative HyperOffice. In fact, theyre the top result for the search “sharepoint alternative”.
Hi there Irwin,
I wrote an article “Tips for Choosing a SharePoint Alternative” that you might find interesting. Check it out when you have a moment. Let me know what you think!
http://budurl.com/bpzj
Best,
Tia
http://budurl.com/bybt
We just switched from sharpoint to Noodle from Vialect. http://www.vialect.com
At first we weren’t sure if it would be a good alternative but after about 3 months in, we didn’t miss anything about Sharepoint. Its nice that Noodle also has some social network parts that our sharepoint didn’t have.
We only looked a few though, some of the ones mentioned may be good as well.
I think the website is
http://www.vialect.com