Introduction

Of course the answer is... it depends!  Although the two products have similarities and Telerik is addressing more and more SharePoint functionality with each new release, in our opinion there are still two distinct purposes:

Sitefinity is geared for content management of a public website

SharePoint is geared for enterprise-wide document management and collaboration of an Intranet website.

We have different projects where we are heavily involved with both products, so we stay up-to-date on both products.

Sitefinity

Sitefinity is a great product with a great future; Telerik continues to enhance the product to with a keen eye for improving the product to address the most important aspects of content management.

SharePoint

SharePoint is a large cumbersome product that is way over priced for its functionality and major shortcomings.  Our stance on SharePoint is to only stay on the surface with a configured implementation without customization.  When we attempt to customize the product, we quickly find it is difficult if not impossible to manage (ex. custom forms with InfoPath will stop and restart the entire Sharepoint service because a DLL update is introduced).  There are some very nice features that are hard to beat and thus we use it, but we vehemently warn our clients about the pitfalls of customization.

Can Sitefinity be used for document management and collaboration?

Yes it can, but the larger the implementation, the stronger the case becomes for the SharePoint features that Sitefinity doesn't currently have (ex. custom lists, spreadsheet data entry, nested sites within sites, the ability to save a template of an entire site hierarchy including data for easy reuse, and the granular backup scheme that allows single document recovery).

Will Sitefinity continue to challenge Microsoft until the tides change?

I'm confident that Telerik can and will take on Microsoft SharePoint.  If you look at Telerik's product line, they have consistently implemented a better visual tool then Microsoft even when it is Microsoft's own design (ex. RADControls, Sitefinity, Web UI Test, etc).

Can Sitefinity do it in the near future?

No, I don't think so. Telerik is taking their time to get Sitefinity v4.0 right and addressing their current core customer base: website content management. That's where they should be concentrating and evolving. With there great visualization skills, they can and will add features that will directly compete with SharePoint.

What one SharePoint feature would I want to see in Sitefinity?

That's easy... Allow me to copy HTML content including images and paste them into a content block where the copied images are handled automatically within Sitefinity. Thus a quick Control C to copy and a Control V to paste and the content is done. I don't want to have to save each graphic or image individually to my desktop, then upload them into a Sitefinity image library, then create a reference to each on within the text content at each strategic location.

I sell Sitefinity to customers because the time they save managing content within Sitefinity has an ROI of a couple of days. I tell my customers that a CMS package breaks down the barrier to the creation of new content or the updating of existing content. One can login and go to an appropriate content module to add the specific content without worrying about page design and consistent website structure, it is done for them.

However, if you are looking to bring in existing content (ex. HTML with images), there can be a significant effort to 'reconstruct' the content when images are formatted into the content... the barrier is still pretty high.

So What are the differences between Sitefinity and SharePoint?

Here is our take on it... see if you agree...

Do you agree?