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sharepointfile-sharing

Is SharePoint the right choice?

My (software) company has hundreds of customers. We'd like to provide each customer with a SkyDrive-like application, something for sharing documents and files in general among their employees or their own customers. The application should be a SaaS one, hosted on my company's server farm.

We took a look to the way SharePoint manages documents, and it's more or less what we need; but we are a little scared by the weight and the complexity of SP (high hardware requirements, high competence required, and we haven't talked about licenses yet!).

Moreover, a consultant told us that choosing SharePoint we should create an instance of SP for each customer (one database for each).

So, the question is: can SP be the right choice? Which simpler and easier solutions can help us to reach the goal? Should we build it by ourselves from scratch?

Update: I forgot to mention that we're looking for an asp.net solution and, in case of third-part applications, we should be able to customize the code.

Solution

  • I would not use SharePoint in your case, mainly for these reasons:

    • There is a licencing cost. You are using only a small part or SharePoint. So the price you are paying for the functionality you are using is high.
    • Scaling SharePoint to many users requires a lot of competence, since you do not have any other SP installation this will be expensive.