Tuesday, October 30, 2012

SharePoint 2013 Cloud or no Cloud - What is your choice?

SharePoint 2013 come up with fantastic features with new UI, new architectures like App Model, Search Crawling and Shredded Storage etc. This new release is impressive and it's support very large and multi-server FARM support. Below are my views on whether to go for Cloud environment or to no go for it.

Why to go for Cloud (SharePoint Online)?

  • Platform: As we already know SharePoint online for 2013 Preview build is available. RTM will be available soon.
  • UI: The new UI is very easy to use, customize and add more functionality through CMS improvements compared to earlier versions.
  • Tools: The Napa tools help us to quickly write the code (Client Side code) and publish them from browser in no time. Very quick development tools. 
  • App Model: The new app model will give us the opportunity to extend our SharePoint system with custom coding. Earlier models supports Sandbox solutions and in 2013 we have both Sandbox and App models. 
  • Design & Customization: It's as easy as uploading a background image and change colors to design a new theme for SharePoint site in 2013, until unless you want to change the master page for full extent. You can customize the master pages with tools like SharePoint Designer and deploy them to SharePoint Online. Themes are very easy to apply and customization is very simple. 
  • Cost: If you like to maintain a FARM on-premises it will be more expensive to maintain the hardware and software. SharePoint online is too cheap compared to on-premises and will save thousands of $. 
Why to not go for Cloud (SharePoint Online)?
  • There are no big new reasons why we need on-premises environment. :) If yours is big organization where many services are running like finance services, corporation intranet, file share and search crawling then we must need on-premises environment. SharePoint Online will not give control to run all these as there is  no authorization to Central Administration. 
  • If an organization has big repository for the documents on file share and you like to crawl them to show results in Search then we must need on-premises.
  • Multi-server FARM is only possible in On-premises and Farm level solutions are possible only in On-premises.
It's completely based on our requirements to decide whether to go for Cloud or not. Above mentioned are the possible reasons according to my view. SharePoint online (build in 2013) is a great product for CMS, small scale intranets. With new templates available in SharePoint 2013, you can build product catalog web sites etc. I believe SharePoint Online will grow fast in near future. 

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