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Microsoft blogs not best of breed
By chris dalby | August 16, 2007
I was pleased to hear from Michael Gannotti’s Podcast on the Go that he aknowledges that Microsoft blogs, wikis and discussion are not best of breed. It was refreshing hear this and it is something that I have blogged about previously. The point he does make, which is again something I have picked up on, is that as a canned service to intergrate quickly and reliably into your .NET infrastructure, these services are the most efficient. So in terms of extending your sharepoint system, there is no better way to do this.
I am increasingly getting asked by customers for extranet/intranet solutions that allows geographically dispersed staff and customers to access resources. While WSS is built into SBS 2003, I have found this to be an unreliable method for this purpose. The reason for this is not the functionality of WSS, but the inevitable lack of upstream bandwidth associated with broadband in the UK (normally 256, max 512), making upload and downloading an impossible task with reasonable file sizes. If a customer uses serviced office space, expect even slower upload because these serviced office space providers generally charge a huge amount of money for a 256 connection which is flakier than a Cadbury’s flake.
The obvious way around this is to get a bigger internet connection. This unfortunately is not a viable option for the majority of small businesses. SDSL in the UK is still a relatively huge amount of money for a SMB to fork out, maybe £200+ a month. Again serviced office space companies generally have huge glass windows on the tech support office so they can see their customers coming from a mile off and would charge a rediculous amount of money for a bigger upload speed.
So the only real solution is using a hosted service and if you want a Sharepoint hosted service, again you’ll pay a premium - suggestions and comments of reasonably priced providers greatly appreciated!
I have followed up this post with a tv show on http://www.kyte.tv/yellowpark
Topics: Podcasts, Tech Watch |