Jul 10, 2014
Hello,
Looking at my referrers, I noticed that this question pointed out to my comparison between SharePoint & Connections (see previous discussions for the link).
I didn't compare Connections and SharePoint/Yammer yet but just Connections & SharePoint Social. Now that I have a little bit more experience with Connections & IBM Products in general, I'd consider choosing either of those products the following way:
- Do you plan for onpremises or a Cloud-based solution?
- Do you plan for 100% out of the box or should you be able to customize the product?
- Do you plan to use *only* the Social piece of Connections or do you plan to also store your documents in it? If yes, what kind of documents, Office (integration isn't as in SharePoint).?
- Are you already working with SameTime or with Lync?
Clearly, I'd choose Connections if :
- I'm already using Sametime and/or other IBM products since you'd have an SSO for free using the LTPA tokens
- I don't plan to customize the product heavily.
- I don't plan to have a real document management system in it (Files+CCM) or only with PDF and non Office Documents
If I'd need more than what's listed above, I'd go for SharePoint which doesn't only offer Social Capabilities but also other workfloads such as an extensive Search Engine, LOB integration, WCM, Collaboration, Social and three development/deployment models (Full Trust Solutions, Sandboxed, Apps).
My experience now with Connections is that it's a nice product but it's harder to customize than SharePoint. It doesn't offer many APIs and it's rather hard to find valuable technical documentation on the product. It's also way harder to find non-IBM people working on the product.
With SharePoint, you can really have an industrialization & full ALM of your devleopments and it's quite easy to find .NET/SharePoint developers all around without the need to involve Microsoft. In conclusion, for pure Social related stuff, Connections is better than SharePoint and maybe even better than Yammer but don't try to do anything else with the product nor to interoperate with other products, especially if these are not IBM ones or headaches will start :)
