The End of Sharepoint: Where to Migrate from Here?

After reading the recent CMSWire article Coping with the Demise of Sharepoint 2007, I realized there are lots of companies out there that are still on Sharepoint.  Given the way Microsoft was giving away licenses of the collaboration portal in the early 2000's, there ended up being a significant number of companies that used Sharepoint for Employee Intranets initially, and then, because the product was already in-house and supported by IT, decided to use it to build their public facing internet sites on.  A quick google search can find 63 million pages on the internet that are still likely on Sharepoint.  In fact, Microsoft itself has discontinued the support for public websites in new versions of Sharepoint and industry analysts note that "Microsoft just doesn't seem interested in digital marketing."

This all should make companies who are using Sharepoint to host their website understandably anxious.

If you are in the marketing department of a company whose site is powered by Sharepoint, it is time to consider migrating to a new CMS. There are a couple alternative CMSs that you should be looking at in particular.  The two that I recommend are based on the .NET platform and are enterprise-class digital marketing platforms that will empower your digital marketers and content managers to create robust, personalized, and consistent experiences throughout your digital properties.

I also wrote a more detailed comparison of these two Digital Marketing Platforms from the perspective of a Sharepoint user.  I highly recommend reading this if you are a Sharepoint CMS editor. Below I have compiled for you reviews of the CMSs from preeminent industry rating companies, and then I recommend a solution for getting you to one of those platforms ASAP. 

Sitecore

Sitecore is a powerhouse in the Digital Marketing space.  Industry analysts place it in the top tier of digital marketing platforms:

• "WCM offering is best-of-breed, while adjacent functionality such as email campaign management, personalization, testing/optimization, and social capabilities is midlevel." – Forrester Research Inc., 2015
• “Sitecore excels at Advanced Personalization – both in breadth and depth of advanced personalization capabilities” – Real Story Group, 2016
• "Consider Sitecore for advanced digital marketing, highly interactive sites, with fast changing content and layouts." - Real Story Group, 2016
• "Few WCM vendors match Sitecore's understanding of the latest digital marketing priorities, practices and technologies. Sitecore continually incorporates into its offering support for leading practices, such as customer journeys, cross-channel marketing, multivariate testing and continuous experiences." - Gartner, 2016

 

You've heard of the old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM", well Sitecore is the 2017 version of that for Digital Marketing Web Content Management Systems.  It's a great platform based on .NET standards that your IT team will love supporting and it will support your needs now and far into the future.

Episerver

Episerver is a slightly smaller scale Digital Marketing Web Content Management system that is making meaningful strides in keeping up with the market leaders.  It has been surging up analysts research reports:

• “Has comparatively advanced digital marketing tools, includes rules-based personalization, marketing dashboards, and ecommerce.” - Real Story Group, 2016
• “Customers regard Episerver highly as a product designed for the future of WCM in an age of digital business.” – Gartner 2015
• “Its granular “atomized” content and high interoperability make it suitable for context-aware computing and multichannel digital experiences” – Gartner 2015
• Episerver has something not many other Web CMS's have in a true cloud offering with a monthly software and service fee that greatly reduces the cost barrier to entry into this Enterprise class Digital Marketing Platform.

So now that you've chosen one of these excellent digital marketing platforms to replace the Sharepoint platform that has been holding your marketing back, the next question is 'How do I get there?"  How can you get onto that new platform in the fastest time possible?

 

Siteport™

Siteport offers an automated migration of Sharepoint sites to Sitecore or Episerver. It can migrate all your content, content types, including the content embedded in web parts.  It can migrate content in multiple languages all while retaining the relationships between your pages and media assets.  There is no need to touch every single piece of content and re-create the new links between pages or fix broken images when the Siteport migration is completed.