SharePoint for Public Web Sites
I often hear people ask if SharePoint can be used to build public web sites. I’m currently working on yet another public facing web site built on SharePoint, so the answer is a definitive yes. More interesting questions are when and why you would use SharePoint over some other, more traditional infrastructure.
I started to compile a list of public web sites on SharePoint to illustrate the “is it possible” questions and found this section of one of my favorite SharePoint demo sites that has already compiled a list of over 500! I’ve been pointing people to Hawaiian Air for years but as you can see on that site and in these screenshots the list of high profile sites built on SharePoint continues to grow.
So why are The Library of Congress, UK Department of Health, Viacom, etc. choosing SharePoint for their public sites and why might you consider it? These are a few of the reasons:
Content Management
As of MOSS 2007 Microsoft has rolled its former Content Management Server product into SharePoint, making it a very capable content management solution for large web site. Support for master layouts, staged content and approvals, multi-language variations are just a few of the features that drive site owners to SharePoint for their site platform.
Enterprise-Class Search
For those web sites that are a source of large amounts of content, the value of that content is often limited by how accessible it is to the site visitor. Advanced, enterprise-class search available via SharePoint, especially enhanced with Microsoft acquisition of FAST, provides dynamic access to deep content repositories that would otherwise not be accessible.
Wikis, Blogs, and Discussions
Though not necessarily best of breed out of the box SharePoint does provide a starter set of social and collaboration features required by most web communities. These are further enhanced by 3rd party solutions layered on top of this base functionality where extra power is needed.
Collaboration
Many organizations are finding they need their public web presence to provide a true collaboration environment for a subset of their user population. Document storage and management, shared calendars, business workflow, etc. are all core aspects of SharePoint that it makes sense to leverage in the right scenario.
SharePoint can be a bit heavyweight for small sites and certainly isn’t recommended in all cases, but when the above types of features come into play, using the enterprise server infrastructure of SharePoint can deliver significant value.
Thanks again to the WSSDemo site for the compilation of public sites built on SharePoint and thanks to Mike Gannotti and his blog where I found some other interesting public site links.
Found any other interesting reasons for going with SharePoint on public facing web sites? I’d love to hear about it.
I was toldi t would cost 100,000 to put our sharepoint online, is this true?
I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon…so I am asking.
Thnaks!
Hi Jane,
That would depend on many things but it isn’t unheard of for a relatively complex, customized site with content management and collaboration features.
For a simpler site with some content management but less overall customization you could expect that to be significantly less.
Shoot me an email and I can follow up in more detail if you are interested. (jeff.vilimek @ technoligence.com)
Thanks!
Follow up on this can be found at http://www.technoligence.com
Enjoy!
I work for a relatively small company (160 employees), in early 2009 the CEO was talked into buying SharePoint by someone who didn’t know better. After almost two years and $300,000 all I can say is we have a nice portal, not any better that what could have been done with FREE software. I seriously think SharePoint is way overpriced for what it does.
Hi zam,
I agree that for small sites SharePoint may not be a good fit. We work with smaller businesses on their public sites based on a variety of content publishing engines. Joomla, Drupal, etc. come to mind. We just finished a couple smaller sites on DotNetNuke as well since we were able to incorporate some ASP.NET services easily.
For very large and complex sites where content publishing pipelines may be distributed over a large organization, many languages are involved, and/or services like document sharing and collaboration workspaces are needed the power of SharePoint can be much more important and justified. These are where SharePoint has come into play for us.
Thanks!