SharePoint vs dotCMS

With most of the workforce working remotely, businesses have realized how important employees’ engagement and experience is.

According to the Harvard Business Review, 75% of employees feel socially isolated after the pandemic, and 90% feel that they need weekly communication from their company working remotely or not. Moreover, companies with engaged employees have 98% greater customer satisfaction and 50% higher customer loyalty than ones with disengaged employees. Improving employee engagement and experience can help your business overall.

Due to this, enterprises have started focusing on their intranets more than ever before. An intranet plays a major role in keeping employees productive and social within the organization, especially when they are not working together from a single office location.

To help you navigate the waters of the DXP ocean, we’ll compare and contrast dotCMS with several competitors to show you why dotCMS is the best option to deliver cutting-edge, omnichannel digital experiences.

Choosing the right intranet solution for your company's content and asset management needs can be challenging. Each solution has its own pros and cons and there is no one size fits all answer.

This blog post will break down the two most popular intranet solutions: SharePoint and dotCMS to help you decide which is best for your company.

What is An Intranet, Again?

In simple terms, an intranet is a closed network restricted to a specific group. When organizations first used intranets for their internal business purposes, they mainly used it for document storage. With the evolution of corporate culture, modern intranets are now treated as digital workplaces to improve the efficiency and engagement of employees.

Enterprises have started using the intranet for most internal processes such as:

• Broadcasting company communications

• Planning projects and workloads

• Storing information in a structured manner

• Tracking time and feedback of employees

• Building virtual connections

• Boosting knowledge sharing

• Employee onboarding and training

• Improve collaborations

With this in mind, an intranet can help you massively improve your business’s communication, organization, and engagement. Yet, again, not all intranets are created equally. Some will be better suited for your company than others.

Let’s now look at these popular intranet solutions and discuss why dotCMS may be the one for you.

Read More: What Is an Intranet, and How Can You Build One?

SharePoint

Overview

Launched by Microsoft in 2001, Sharepoint is a popular collaborative platform. It's a mobile intelligent intranet system that enables organizations to manage and share knowledge, harness teamwork, and quickly track information within the company.

Furthermore, it accelerates productivity and helps create rich digital experiences like custom workflows, forms, or apps for any device. Since it's highly customizable, you can build websites and collaborative solutions with it. At the same time, strategic planning is required to confirm that you do not waste your efforts and budget in the initial system build. Otherwise, it may lead to poor performance and low adoption rates.

Pros

• Comes with an affordable price tag.

• Easy to manage and clear transparency in context to document updates.

• Ability to collaborate using co-authoring with no hassles.

• Potential to add enough security levels to store confidential documents.

Cons

• Your team may need additional training to learn the ins and outs of the system.

• The sheer number of tools and options included can be overwhelming to the users.

• The platform requires initial implementation by Microsoft experts, which incurs additional cost and time to set up.

Read More: Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint

What is Sharepoint Good for?

SharePoint is a value-packed platform,making it highly effective for teams to integrate it with their existing CRM, ERPs, or workflows. It's best for enterprises looking for customized collaboration solutions. Since it has a steep learning curve, you will need to pre-plan for additional time and expenses to set up and get accustomed to the platform.

dotCMS

Overview

dotCMS is built the modern way as an API-first, Cloud based, hybrid headless CMS. This allows dotCMS to offer secure, flexible, scalable tools to build websites, intranets, extranets, and mobile apps. With dotCMS, you do not need to rely heavily on your IT team as it provides a high level of NoCode tools to build and manage digital experiences.

Also, dotCMS acts as a catalyst to break down information silos, fast-track internal communication and organize smooth collaborations within an organization.

Pros

• Easy to learn and adapt

• Seamless third-party integrations

• Omnichannel content delivery

• Provides cutting-edge tech stack for your business

• Excellent ways to manage and share content in different formats

• Pricing is based on licensing and not the number of users

• Avoids extensive IT support and expense to a great extent

• Open Source

Cons

• No flat pricing; you need to request a quote based on your needs

• Connecting to certain databases like LDAP work only with an enterprise license

What is dotCMS Good for?

dotCMS is ideal for medium to large businesses looking for an easy way to adapt with a futuristic solution that empowers them to publish on any device and channel. As dotCMS is an open-source cloud solution, you get the power to access full source code and create your own content as per your needs without any hassles of maintaining servers.

Sharepoint vs OneDrive vs dotCMS

When it comes to comparing these two business solutions, Sharepoint has the full potential of an intranet system but needs upskilling of employees and has hidden costs related to the initial setup.

Whereas dotCMS is future-proof intranet software that comes with comparatively low cost and additional benefits.

Let's take a look at what customers have to say about dotCMS and Sharepoint:

Side-by-Side

Source: G2.com

Read More: Intranet Security Best Practices

Why is dotCMS The Best Intranet Solution?

dotCMS has all the features of a modern cloud-based intranet: flexibility, simplicity, and ease. It easily adapts to suit an organization’s goals. dotCMS can provide a creative outlet, a collaboration hub, and a digital workplace to support your business needs.

Other major benefits of dotCMS include:

More Than an Intranet

Although many people may adopt dotCMS only to use it as a modern intranet, it acts as a much wider solution for your business. You get added advantages like:

• Building digital experiences on the go

• Easy content management as it includes a CMS

• Headless CMS enables more security

• Future-ready solutions for omnichannel delivery

Faster to Learn

You do not need to be tech-savvy to employ dotCMS to its full potential. With dotCMS, you get user-friendly interfaces and LowCode to NoCode tools to build forms, workflows, or even websites. Because of this, businesses of any size can adopt dotCMS as it eliminates the need for a dedicated developer or an IT team.

Truly Employee-Centric Experience

dotCMS focuses primarily on employee experience and engagement. It has been designed to empower everyone within the enterprise and therefore, there is no heavy reliance on the technical know-how of a person to use the intranet system, unlike Sharepoint. It also offers a world-class UI experience to your employees while still using the custom processes you build specifically for your business.

Read More about dotCMS as an intranet here: dotCMS: Open Source Intranet Software