Microsoft. The Leviathan of Computing. A household name across 6 continents whose hegemony has until recently remained unchallenged.

This unparalleled degree of success has created the enviable environment where consumers will buy Microsoft products purely based on the brand name, and with little regard to efficiency or ROI.

With a brand obsessed naivete many worldly business people would like to see themselves as above, companies the world over have reached for the most comfortingly familiar name when seeking collaboration solutions.

Whether it is the notoriously expensive and complicated Sharepoint, the Microsoft offering to Medium to Large businesses, or the more basic and restrictive Office 365 which they market to smaller enterprises the 'big kid on the block' has been trading on its famous name for far too long.

The birth of Cloud computing has raised a David to face the High-Tech Goliath, and despite the size difference between the two sides the weaknesses of Microsoft's platforms are beginning to show behind the façade of expensive publicity and glossy advertising.

Once you push past the propaganda and face the cold hard facts Sharepoint is revealed as little more than the little old man of the Wizard of Oz, masquerading as an all powerful computing wizard- and at the same time charging exorbitant prices for the deception.

A company opting for Sharepoint has to:

buy the appropriate licenses

pay for installation

If they do not already run Microsoft servers they then have to buy these

pay to train their staff

pay eye watering prices for extensive and expensive customisation of the entire system by a team of external experts, charging by the day, sometimes for several months

This is the Sharepoint Trap. Having gone to all this expense you still have yet to actually begin using the Sharepoint system. So you haven’t encountered any of the myriad of limitations and problems associated with it. Nor the costs for the upkeep of those hungry servers.

Any self-respecting businessperson should by now be wincing at the thought of expending such money. However it is necessary right? There is no alternative.

Wrong!

There is no need to throw away money on such superfluous and complicated infrastructure.

With cloud computing technologies as company can have the features offered by Sharepoint, plus greater interactivity and flexibility, for a fraction of the cost, time and effort required to set up the clunking, money guzzling Microsoft dinosaur. Choosing a much easier to use Project Management Software and Client Portal tool can ease your Collaboration and file management pain points like nothing else.

Technology has evolved- and so should you!