Sharepoint 2010 as framework for website?

Question

So I'm looking at several solutions for our new website. And we've looked at ExpressionEngine first and foremost.

Now, during brainstorming today, one person said "why don't we use Sharepoint 2010 to build the site on?", and it doesn't seem like a horrible idea. I mean, we're based around Office anyway. We use Lync and have an intranet based on Sharepoint 2010 anyway.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Would it cost more to develop an internet webpage on Sharepoint 2010 opposed to using ExpressionEngine?

Answer 1

We're using SP2010 for our company's public website right now and I wish we weren't.

We inherited the decision to do this when insourcing development from a supplier and have found some pretty significant issues:

• Deployment is hard! We wanted to build and deploy in a single click but even with weeks of effort automating the deployment (building the package, getting it onto the server, deactivating and uninstalling the old features, installing and activating the new ones in the right order, writing custom feature receivers to push changes down to the existing content which uses them etc.) our deployment process still contains many manual steps which we can't avoid.
• The use of Content Types to model data is a big problem. They are hard to define, hard to maintain and extremely hard to implement changes to correctly (see the comment above about writing a custom feature receiver to push changes down to content which is using them).
• It's not mature as a web content management system, meaning we've had to write features to do things which really should be included out of the box, for example being able to add meta title, meta description and meta keyword data for SEO purposes or creating 301 / 302 redirects between pages.
• Our Content Editors aren't impressed with it as compared to other CMSs they have used, reporting that it is clunky and not very intuitive to use.
• Unit Testing is very hard to do with SharePoint.
• Don't be tempted to use InfoPath forms. We tried and abandoned them as a lost cause.

I'd still advocate looking at what functionality you're going to want to implement and seeing whether SharePoint gives you any of this for free. It might be worth it, but it wasn't for us.

Answer 2

You'll need to look into the costs of an external ip connection licence. The last time I checked into this MS quoted me £30K, the time before that £50k.

There are a few hosted service providers that offer web services for 2010, but it's relatively expensive.

Unless you really need enterprise workflow, active directory integration, and a DMS you're setting yourself up for a world of pain for something you could achieve with Wordpress in half the time and about a third of the budget.