Is using SharePoint as a intranet/extranet portal a good idea?

Question

I work for a fortune 500 company in IT and we have developed many systems/applications to do a variety of things. We are in need of some commonality of these applications and a better portal/dashboard/landing page for these applications. So, our customers and employees would log into this portal and see all the "things" that they can do which then link to their own application. This could maybe just iframe in each application inside of this portal to keep brand and navigation consistency.

We are trying to decide whether to use SharePoint 2007 or 2010 for this or develop a portal/dashboard of sorts in house. We would like this portal to look and feel very branded to our needs and really not even feel like its using SharePoint (if needed). An example is to provide our own Menu control that drives the navigation if needed.

Does anyone have any pros/cons for using SharePoint in such a way? Any advice on implementation (e.g. use 2010, much easier to customize design than 2007, etc)?

Answer 1

One can customise the look of Sharepoint fairly easily and for Sharepoint type things you might want to do ( typically around lists, document libraries and workflows ) it is a really good tool.

There are problems around customisation in some respects - the minute you start to do things in anything but the "Sharepoint Way" ( which is often necessary for fairly routine things you might want to do ) you can find yourself running in circles, jumping through numerous hoops and generally having to go through C, D, H, J, Q and Z before you can get from A to B. Fortunately with a fairly mature product as it is now, you can often find blogs covering problems that are challenging you or off-the-shelf web parts you can licence rather than writing your own. For some standard things ( Sharepoint Wikis are attrocious, for example ) you might be better off using a licenced component rather than the built in one regardless.

Also Sharepoint can behave in fairly inexplicable ways- if you are thinking of using different authentication types for users on the intranet and users on the extranet you would want to look closely at how best to implement that. Not impossible by any means but tricky.

On the whole I think Sharepoint is a pretty good platform and well worth considering very seriously. It's almost certainly better than starting from scratch and probably good enough for what you need, but you should definitely do some evaluation and prototyping before you commit yourselves.

Be aware that to get the best from Sharepoint 2010 you will need everyone to have Office 2010 as well...

Answer 2

yes absolutely I been using sharepoint for Intranet for last the 3 years and iw ould say is a very powerful product for Intranet maintainance .. as far the usability goes.. our end users really love it compared to the old model of file share docu share acces rights... etc...

I highly recommend you to go with the sharepoint plan... for both Intranet and Internet

About using 2010 I have attended some webinars and read about the 2010.. iw ould say microsoft really opened up the sharepoint customization with 2010... There were some issues on both administration and development with 2007 but as far as my inital review went with 2010 Microsoft has really improved a lot and made Sharepoint very powerful and easy to use product... there are lot of third party sharepoint products based companies (Ex. Avepoint) that are organizing events and webinars and explaining the most enhancements for 2010 and how one can use SP2010 to get the most of out. try to check out them for more understanding of what you need to implement .. how you can you for your company etc..etc...

Answer 3

Glenatron's right on the money on customizability.

If you're not going to use the document/content management features, Sharepoint can be a bit overkill for just landing/showcase pages. I recommend starting with Sharepoint Foundation 2010 and upgrading if necessary. The jump from WSS 3.0 to Sharepoint 2007 brings quite a bit of baggage that you may or may not end up using, while the 2010 versions offer more granularity with individually togglable services.