Hi guys,
If you’re building a new community (of which there already are quite a few), then why choose to create a site which is NOT built in SharePoint? Sorry, but I really don’t get that. Especially with all the new social features in 2013 I would expect all community sites to adopt 2013 as soon as possible. But that’s just my humble opinion 🙂
Worth a shot Jasper. Certainly. We got a offer of free hosting with FPWeb.Net but that’s only Foundation and limited in users. We can go to 20 thousand users on this.
It would be good promo for Ms but I guess they have costs to keep down as well.
Thanks for all replies (and sorry for my late one…). I do understand all of the reasons, but I find it unbelievable Microsoft is selling this platform as THE collaborative software solution. It’s meant to make people work together, share information, collaborate. Exactly the things we’re doing here. But almost every community site I know, which offers these capabilities, is NOT using SharePoint to host it.
I’m going to see if I can get through to Microsoft in order to solve this. Probably won’t succeed, but there’s nothing wrong with trying; right?
Just to reiterate what Vlad and Mark already said, we really did try as hard as we could to use SharePoint for this site. Â We asked ourselves the exact same question and really wanted it to be SharePoint and explored many different SharePoint options. Â But for all the reasons mentioned it just wasn’t feasible to get up and running at a reasonable cost and in the timeframe that we wanted. Â
It’s also worth mentioning that we look at many approaches for free hosting and even though we had some generous offers, there would still be a significant outlay off both development time and cost, which made it impossible for us.
Shame I know, but that’s where we are and we hope it doesn’t detract too much from the main purpose of the site which is to encourage for us all to find and make new SharePoint friends. I have already got 10-15 that I would love to have a beer with at the next conference.
Hi Jasper,
This is a very good question. I will tell you the reasons:
1.  The first important reason is hosting costs. Me and Mark are paying for hosting & domain out of our pockets.Also, you can’t make an office 365 public site and allow people to be members, licensing costs would kill us.
2. SharePoint blogging engine isn’t perfect, and that’s why people like Joel Oleson are moving from SharePoint to WordPress.
3. Ning has built in features for building a community already and there is not much need for custom development.Â
