Skip to main content

SharePoint online or On Premises?

You will find quite a few articles talking and comparing SharePoint online and on premise. I found an interesting post and just copy and paste below:

In April 2011, Microsoft launched Office 365 – a comprehensive set of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that allow any organization to obtain hosted, cloud-based access to Exchange, Lync, Office Web Applications – and SharePoint Online.
All offer guaranteed uptime, fault tolerance, contractual service levels, and clear, predictable pricing.

How Do You Choose Between Cloud and On-Premises?

Many organizations start by moving email to the cloud.
Few organizations have highly customized Exchange email environments. For many, it’s a no-brainer to migrate existing mailboxes to a hosted version of Exchange, because it simplifies the level of infrastructure support for fault tolerance, recovery, web access, border security, and archiving.
And, the services and configuration used for Exchange service on premises are usually the same among different firms. It’s email.
SharePoint is different. Imagine a world where on-premises SharePoint never existed. (Imagine!) Now, suppose that in a world of Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, and Box.Net, Microsoft had announced a new service that allowed the following:
  • Usage on demand
  • 100GB of content databases
  • Collaboration team sites, extranets, public websites
  • My Sites
  • Rich browser forms (InfoPath), custom code, and workflows
  • Cross-site, self-tuning secure search
  • Managed taxonomy and folksonomy
People would be blown away by the depth of functionality Microsoft made available in the cloud. I mean it – there would be wild celebrations and stampedes in the street!
But that’s not the perception of Office 365-based SharePoint. Instead, there’s a lot of needless focus on “what’s left out.” (SharePoint Online does lack a few features relative to on-premises SharePoint.)

Questions Help Determine Answers

Determining whether to use SharePoint Online instead of on-premises SharePoint can be complicated. Here’s a simple set of questions to help determine if SharePoint Online makes sense (see below). For each question, give yourself points as noted in the box.


QuestionYesNo
Are you already using custom-coded SharePoint solutions, such as third-party tools or in-house Visual Web Parts? 0 3
Are you free from strict geographic control and accountability for your SharePoint content (e.g., not subject to HIPAA, SAS70, US FDA, Sarbanes Oxley or other regulations)? 4 0
Do you already have SharePoint engineers on staff? 0 3
Do you have a limited IT capital budget, but significant IT operating budgets? 1 0
Do you have a mature, on-premises installation of SharePoint 2010? 0 3
Do you have access to dedicated SharePoint developers? 0 2
Do you have as many or more users outside your corporate network as you do inside the firewall? 3 0
Do you need to downsize or eliminate physical servers and data centers used with SharePoint? 3 0
Do you need to migrate off a legacy installation of SharePoint 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0? 3 0
Do you need to rapidly set up a pilot or proof-of-concept SharePoint site, independent of any current usage? 3 0
Do you project growth to a very large content pool over the next year (500GB or more)? 0 2
Do you use or need to use SharePoint-hosted business intelligence solutions such as Performance Point? 0 2
Add up your scores, and see how you match up:
32:  You are probably already on SharePoint Online or Office 365. Enjoy the view from your cloud!
24-31: You are a strong candidate for SharePoint Online. Study carefully and understand some of the functional tradeoffs of the platform. SharePoint Online doesn’t support the following:
  • Deployment of custom solutions that require direct access to the server, such as Visual Web Parts. It does support sandboxed solutions, however.
  • PowerPivot
  • SQL Server Reporting Service Integration
  • Business Connectivity Services (originally this was a blanket restriction, but a slipstream release in 2011 added support for access to web services-based remote data in O365 BCS).
  • FAST Search Server Integration
  • Web Analytics
  • Site collections greater than 100GB
10-23:  You are somewhere in between. Understanding the platform advantages and tradeoffs is essential to figuring out your cloud strategy. Odds are good that you may use a hybrid approach in which parts of your SharePoint world remain on premises, with other aspects living on Office 365.
0-9:  If SharePoint is already living in your data center, it’s probably in the right place.


It’s also important to remember that a cloud vision is almost always a future-looking strategy. Since the cloud is uniformly available, it’s easier to deliver content to users with less respect for their immediate location or device (PCs, tablets, smartphones).
Similarly, although Office 365 and SharePoint Online lack features relative to on-premises SharePoint, this isn't expected to be a permanent situation. If we project forward through the next release of SharePoint, we can forecast a time when the on-premises and cloud versions of SharePoint provide nearly identical functions.
What will make it really interesting comes after that – when new features start showing up in the cloud before they are bundled into the next major SharePoint on-premises release. A cloud-hosted SharePoint offering with better functions and simplified ease of operation will be a hard combination to deny for many current on-premises users.

To read the whole article: please go to: http://sharepointpromag.com/blog/sharepoint-decision-do-we-choose-cloud-or-premises

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Step-by-Step guide to use HttpModule in SharePoint with SPContext

I guess you must be familiar with what is HttpModule and how can we leverage it for our web applications. But if not, better have a good read of this article . SharePoint is built on top of .NET, so it has all the rights to use the beauties of .NET. Here I want to demo a simple case of httpmodule on SharePoint. Say if in a company it has lots of site collections and user 'Picky Docky' has access for all of them, for a reason farm administrator want to block him for one of the specific site without change his SharePoint permissions. Here are the steps to do it:-)   Create a empty SharePoint solution add a class file to it named  CustomSecurityModule.cs , code as below Create a feature and scope to "WebApplication" Create a feature receiver. Code as below When activate the feature it will create a modle in the web.config file for the SharePoint web applicaiton you deployed to as below: Enjoy!

SharePoint 2013 online Parent/Child relationship - A step by step demo

SharePoint uses lookup fields to represent the Parent-Child relationship. For child list items it is OK as you can trace back to its parent from the lookup field. For parent the OOB forms are not good enough as they are not displaying the children belong to it. In real world it is often required that when view the parent list item it also displays its children, further more it is great if user can add child list items directly from the parent. In SharePoint on-premise we can use visual web parts and code the parent/child logic and use web part pages to replace the parent item forms. In SharePoint online we can't do server model code and visual web parts, so the solution is almost NO CODE and just a little bit client side scripts, and they work beautifully! Here I will do a step by step demonstration to explain the ideas:   Step 1: Create a parent list called "Category" and a child list called "Product", in Product list add a lookup field to reference Cat...

SharePoint search on local file drive - Why and How

A team member asked me why in some situation we need to use SharePoint search on local file drive as we can do 'search' directly on the folder in windows. I think it is necessary to do some research to show why and why the benifit is to do this. And more importantly - HOW.   WHY? If you've played around with SharePoint local file search the answer is straight-forward: You can let it search multiple local file drives, but using windows you can hardly do this. SharePoint can search 'into' the real content even the keyword is in content of files in zip file . See the comparison I did a search for keyword 'issue':   Window built-in search: SharePoint search: SharePoint search can easily filter the result by type/date etc. SharePoint can show a bit of content from the files found to give a bit more indication. ... HOW  It's hard to find a step-by-step guide talking about how to make it work. That's why here I am:-)   Go to the f...