Sharepoint CMS vs UmbracoCMS

Question

I work for a large local government organisation who are about to embark on using SharePoint to replace our ageing intranet with an all-singing all-dancing collaborative site. The focus for the intranet will be replacing random files, content pages and documents that are spread across the organisation with a SharePoint installation which will magically bring order to all of this.

The decision to use SharePoint for the intranet has already been made.

The CMS we use on our public website also needs replacing. I have proposed using UmbracoCMS, but due to the pending SharePoint implementation on our intranet, my boss has suggested using SharePoint for the website too. He's suggested this from a purely logical point of view as he's not a developer, and I can understand why this course of action might appear to be the obvious way forward.

I am very skeptical about using SharePoint to cover our website. We would only need the actually 'content managerment' elements of it with much of the rest of the website being made up of existing .NET applications.

For our Intranet, developing something with SharePoint seems obvious as it will integrate with email and Office and will allow sharing of content and integrate with our Active Directory (or that's what I assume).

However, our website is completely different and contains many applications together with an archaic CMS. This is a public sector website so website accessibility and interoperability are key. It needs to be easy to use and generate clean accessible output and valid XHTML compliant code. We don't need any of the collaborative or document sharing features of SharePoint for the website.

My gut feeling with using SharePoint for the website is that it is an extremely bad idea.

I have suggested UmbracoCMS as the control I expect we will have will be greater than with SharePoint and it's integration with .NET means that we will potentially be able to knit all of our applications together more easily than with SharePoint.

Does anybody have any experience of using either or both of these products or know of any cool features in either SharePoint/Umbraco that I might make this a little more clear cut?

Answer 1

Being on the tail-end of building one of the largest public-facing, pure web CMS sites on MOSS 2007 (extranet/intranet/internet), I can say quite confidently that it absolutely blows as a CMS. Collaboration portal? Pretty decent. Document management? Not bad at all. WCMS? Awful. Horrible. Stay away.

Why? Sure you can make it work, as there are plenty of examples out there. You can look at the finished product from the outside and it might look pretty decent. But you have no idea how much pain, frustration, cost overruns, delays, and general badness happened to get there. Trust me, it can be quite a lot.