Wordpress, Drupal

As probably a few people know I’m a big fan of Wordpress and Drupal. I know they are not always Enterprise ready but still SharePoint can learn from these two. A lot seems to be about manageability inside SharePoint but that is the number one thing users don’t care about at all and why should they? There is a good article posted by Dion Hinchcliffe on some of the issues with SharePoint. His line

Traditional enterprise systems, including SharePoint, tend to be more rigid in their ability to be shaped by users and too often force users into pre-determined uses rather than letting the users shape the use of the tools to best fit the work.

…is one that does it for me.

Isn’t it weird to notice that many SharePoint professionals do SharePoint for business but use Drupal or Wordpress for their own site? That has all to do with usability and nothing with price. For a very low monthly fee you can get SharePoint hosting nowadays. So usability and easy of deployment is the key issue and also freedom of choice. Wordpress and Drupal offer lots of choices in terms of themes, plugins, modules etc. Sure, SharePoint does too but installation and flexibility is limited for some reason (maybe in my mind). One thing I want to add here too, unmanaged code like PHP is easier :-)

However, we shouldn’t compare all features of Wordpress and Drupal to SharePoint. I think it is fair to compare the personal features of SharePoint (MySites, blogs etc.) to the mentioned OpenSource portals. Below I will outline some features of Wordpress and compare them to SharePoint.

Features vs Plugins

The first problem an end-user has with features is that it does leave him a little clueless. Also the fact that we have site-collection features and site features are confusing. My second point is that features just sit there without clear information on how to upgrade them or download new ones. I know SharePoint is originally a inside the firewall solution but even then it could have used an internal feature store (managed and offered by an admin). Actually that would have improved the manageability. (watch our new offering).

Take a look at the screenshots below and tell me which you like most.

Are you getting it? In Wordpress you can one click install or update plugins (features) from a central repository and you can easily upgrade them. I know, technically more difficult for SharePoint but does a user care how difficult it is to implement?

Web parts vs Widgets

I think these are comparable in both portal solutions but SharePoint clearly offers a better way to drag and drop them.Also in terms of functionality both systems offer comparable capabilities. However, Wordpress has lots of good quality ones that can be installed easily with the same mentioned plugin system. Wordpress also has much more social plugins but over time I think SharePoint could catch-up.

Installation and configuration

If you compare MySites to a Wordpress blog then you can only conclude that SharePoint is easier to install, with one click the user can activate it. Wordpress is more work but offers more flexibility in the end.

The overall picture

Probably a lot of this is a feeling but my feeling says overall Wordpress offers more bang for the buck if you compare it to MySites (and that is the comparison you need to make). MySites is immature and company restrictions don’t help in terms of flexibility. 5 years ago nobody could setup a site easily but the world has changed and lots of people setup personal sites without a problem. That also means they add advanced features like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook etc. to their site and they use it!

It is not always a technical discussion, many times it is company policy and restrictions or ideas on how people should use tools inside the organization. It also takes time for organizations to adapt to new tools and to change policies. Take Twitter, basically messaging and it could easily be compared with SMS. Does your organization have a policy around SMS? Yes, because of the costs or because of the idea that people use it to waste time?

I remain a big fan of Wordpress simply because the CMS is better and the sheer power of plugins and the community behind it, it will take a long time before I would run my personal sites on SharePoint. As you probably know, our zevenseas site runs on SharePoint.