IT managers choosing SharePoint over WordPress

Despite an increase in popularity of WordPress, IT teams are still choosing to deploy SharePoint as an enterprise CMS, a local chief architect has claimed.

SSW (Superior Software for Windows) chief architect, Adam Cogan, told the audience at the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney that despite many companies being unable to deploy SharePoint without adding extras like comment functions and spam filters, it is still preferred by CEOs and CIOs.

“I have a lot of conversations with CEOs and CIOs about whether to go to SharePoint or not... so I want to talk about these types of conversations,” he said.

“SharePoint is a bit of a big beast and part of the reason it goes well is that it integrates quite well across a number of feature sets.

It’s often not best of breed at anything but holistically, it’s quite good.”

Cogan addressed a room of web developers and IT managers and said that while there are a large number of free or low-cost CMS options available, enterprises using Microsoft products will generally choose SharePoint.

“There’s a lot of competition out there... but companies still choose SharePoint,” he said. “... It doesn’t matter how good the other ones are, they don’t have Office integration.”

To successfully deploy SharePoint, Cogan said having a balanced IT team was vital.

“The problem when you approach a SharePoint project that doesn’t have much experience, you come across with way too much code to maintain due to a lack of guidance,” he said.

“I would typically say that you need architects, developers and designers”

Having an integrated team was also important, with Cogan saying that time is wasted if a CMS deployment isn’t based on collaboration amongst the IT team.

“One of the things we’ve experienced is that the designers and developers [should be] working together,” he said. “... there is a lot of burnt time if you decide to use teams that are responsible for [only] one part of that.”

Cogan’s talk comes as Marist College in Canberra last week shared its SharePoint success story, with ICT manager, Michael Plenty, saying the system was deployed within a matter of months.

Follow Lisa Banks on Twitter: @CapricaStar

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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