SharePoint and Its Sometimes Interesting Costs
November 3, 2011
SharePoint is touted as the ultimate solution to content management and collaboration for enterprises. Microsoft, however, never discusses the costs associated with their software, except for how it’s cost effective and overtime will save your business money. But is that true? Redmondmag.com posted an enlightening article about the hidden costs involved in a SharePoint project, “Study: SharePoint Costs High Due to Inadequate Skills.”
A study conducted by the Azaleos Corp. discovered that the average cost to run SharePoint per user is $46/month. Using Microsoft Exchange proved to be cheaper at $15-15/month per user. SharePoint users also cited downtime as the most common problem.
“The downtime mostly stemmed from hardware errors or mistakes made by IT team members. Those problems caused average monthly management costs for SharePoint to double to around $90 per user per month. Almost half (43 percent) of study respondents pointed to “a lack of administrator skills, training, and knowledge as an inhibitor to efficiently leveraging SharePoint.”
SharePoint is still a young piece of software with a manifest destiny for its future. Its problems are many, but there are a lot of third party solutions to resolve them. At the end of the article, Azaleos Corp. advertises it’s AzaleosX app to help increase uptime.
We believe that you may want to take a close look at the cost effective search and content processing solution from SurfRay. Contain costs and improve user satisfaction with one snap in for SharePoint.
Whitney Grace, November 3, 2011
SurfRay
Comments
One Response to “SharePoint and Its Sometimes Interesting Costs”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Yes, a lot of corporations see the benefits of adopting SharePoint- for content management, collaboration, CRM, all kinds of interesting applications. Yet many fail to understand the costs of deploying SharePoint on in-house infrastructure. Outsourcing SharePoint hosting to a 3rd party provider can cut down on these costs SIGNIFICANTLY.
For the exact reasons you’ve pointed out- hardware errors, IT mistakes and ultimately, downtime- migrating from on-premise servers to a hosted SharePoint environment can save a lot of time, money and frustration.
My company, Fpweb.net, provides SP2010 and SP2007 managed hosting. We take care of the details so that corporate end-users can continue using SharePoint without interruptions. That makes life easier for IT managers, and it shaves a lot expenses from the bottom line.