Q: What’s better, SharePoint on the Cloud or On Premise? A: Both!
One of the hottest topics in the world of SharePoint today is whether to locate your next instance of SharePoint on the “Cloud” or “On Premise”. If you search the web you’ll find hundreds of blog articles providing detailed analysis of the pros and cons of either approach. Fortunately, the answer is easy. It’s not an either/or situation… it’s “both”.SharePoint on the Cloud and SharePoint On Premise are very different animals. And, like the old adage “use the right tool for the job” it’s very possible that for most people, they would benefit from having both. But don’t worry, taking this approach will not only simplify your SharePoint experience but probably provide the best bang for the buck too. Here’s why:
SharePoint and Office on the Cloud just works.
It probably comes as no surprise that as SharePoint becomes more sophisticated so does Microsoft Office. As users become more sophisticated, Workflows and SharePoint Composites demand a very high level of smooth integration between these two environments. As more and more people depend on this highly sophisticated interwoven environment, the cost of achieving and maintaining seamless integration skyrockets.
The big advantage to Office 365 and SharePoint Online is that Microsoft assumes the cost of supporting the amalgamation of these two environments. When you add Exchange and instant messaging to this mix you really start to appreciate the incredible value of Microsoft “guaranteeing” that all of these things will just work together seamlessly.
So if an Office 365 and SharePoint Online combo provided by Microsoft is so great why would you want a dedicated version of SharePoint too? That’s simple. Because SharePoint Online is a shared environment, you’re typically prevented from doing anything that might inconvenience the other organizations that share the cloud with you. If you need to pop open Visual Studio and start writing some serious code to create a sophisticated custom application, it’s very likely you’ll be prevented from doing that in the Office 365 cloud version of SharePoint.
You can have your cake and eat it too!
Fortunately, Microsoft’s newest licensing models provide a greater level of flexibility in approaching this issue than at anytime in the past. Todays pricing models are far more user based than server based.
The best solution for many organizations is to implement Office 365 /SharePoint Online to provide an environment for all of the staff to use for their SharePoint and Office needs. Here you build your department sites with libraries for all your documents. Your e-mail is managed here. And Microsoft’s consistent care and grooming of this integrated environment benefits all of your employees by providing a smooth predictable experience on a daily basis. This is a tremendous money saver compared to trying to install and maintain a combined SharePoint/Office environment using your own IT staff.
Meanwhile, with a much smaller On Premise implementation of SharePoint by itself, you can create highly customized, very sophisticated SharePoint solutions without disrupting others. And then all you need to do is link this custom application to your cloud environment.
Depending on the size of your IT department you may want to have your “dedicated” SharePoint environment located in a “dedicated cloud”, so that the care and grooming of this environment is managed by people who do it every day and all your IT folks need to do is create some whizbang solutions.
Many organizations take this philosophy one step further by creating an even more local instance of SharePoint (perhaps on a single server in one of their offices) on which they can do truly experimental work without risking either their Cloud production environment or their dedicated production environment.
The fundamental philosophy is to have two or three SharePoint environments selected and appropriately sized for the tasks and the number of people that will be dependent on them.
So the next time someone asks you if they should go with SharePoint on the Cloud or On Premise just tell them “yes!”.
No comments:
Post a Comment