Can I use SharePoint online like I would SharePoint enterprise? Say I wanted to create multiple similar and related external facing sites; do I have a limitation on how many external sites? So I can take advantage of all features of SharePoint like mail, reporting and storage without deploying SharePoint on premise or creating s custom portal site. My plan is to run everything on the cloud. What would be the best approach?
Thanks for the feedback this helps, My scenario is having to create a portal that does pretty much everything SharePoint does, hence the need to ask myself if I should invest in a custom portal or taking advantage of SharePoint.
My drawback was my client does not want to invest in an on premise solution, which brought me to wonder how much I can do with SharePoint Online.
Patrick yes I would have preferred to create several external facing sites basically sub sites with different URL’s but looks like I am limited to one.  I would like to explore more on extranet-like sites as I am not looking for a document repository, but want each site to be autonomous in a way with different functionality.
And by mail I mean outlook, and all the good things that come with SharePoint, shared calendar, easy to administer, cross site collection publishing etc.
In summary based of my requirements, am thinking, Custom application or SharePoint in regards to ROI
Hope this makes sense.
Hi,
Here is the service description. It’s a great overview between the difference between On-premise and online:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint-online-service-description.aspxÂ
That is a bit of a loaded question.
First, external facing sites:
You will for sure run into issues with your requirements for “multiple external facing sites.” I believe you only get 1 public facing Site Collection (which is created for you by default in SharePoint Online 2013). However, as I understand, you can not create sub-sites within that Site Collection. If you are looking for extranets, the story is getting better with “external users” and even using guest links within SkyDrive or other document libraries. By this I mean, you can create more than 1 extranet-like sites within SharePoint Online.
Second, “Other features: mail”
I assume that you mean Outlook? Outlook is a component of Office 365, so yes, you can run email in the cloud.
Third, “The rest of the features”
On-prem & Office365 are still different products. The cloud is getting closer and closer to it’s on-prem counterpart (most recently with the search web part and cross site-collection publishing), but there is a difference in their features. If your current usage of SharePoint is simplistic, you will likely not see any critical differences. If your current SharePoint environment is complex and/or custom, you will have to do some work moving to the cloud.
Some other notes:
One thing to consider is a hybrid approach in which some of your applications (perhaps any applications that were customized) live on your on-prem environment and you begin moving everything else to the cloud.Â
That was a bit of a mouthful – let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
Cheers
You can take advantage of all of those features in the cloud without needing on-prem SharePoint. When you say “external facing sites,” do you mean anonymous public facing sites or do you mean authenticated extranet sites? I think you only get 1 anonymous public facing site.
