Many organizations continue to implement supposed collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint. However, this is a technology unloved and un-used, that has users scratching their heads and reverting to collaboration via e-mail. Microsoft's SharePoint Server currently epitomises the state of legacy collaboration tools and presents challenges such as poor user adoption and complex licensing. This whitepaper examines how enterprise cloud collaboration and content management tools, such as Huddle, overcome many of issues associated with legacy systems and support effective collaboration in today's 24/7 organizations.

1. Effective collaboration in
your business

2. Effective collaboration in your bussiness
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 The need for collaboration
1 Collaboration and the cloud
2 SharePoint - A limited and limiting collaboration tool
3 Total Cost of Ownership
4 Huddle - True collaboration
4 About Huddle

3. THE NEED FOR COLLABORATION
With the uncertainty surrounding the world economy showing no sign of abating,
businesses are changing the ways in which they work, becoming increasingly global
and diversified, and collaborating in ever growing numbers. The days where you worked
with only the few people in your immediate location are gone forever. Modern business
sees collaboration across geographies and time zones and with a wide range of
contacts, including suppliers, partners, external consultants, clients and many more.
A broad selection of media has said that we live in a ‘Collaboration Economy’ and it is
undoubtedly true that social media has changed the way we communicate in both our
personal and professional lives. But collaboration is really about people and a different
approach to achieving goals and technology is what enables that to take place. So
it is therefore important to give your employees the right tools to enable them to do
their jobs and seize the business opportunities that present themselves. But what
exactly do we mean by collaboration and what are the best tools to get your workforce
collaborating effectively?
COLLABORATION AND THE CLOUD
It is highly unlikely that any employee consciously thinks they want to ‘collaborate’ in
their work, yet it is something that impacts many employees within an organization.
People are inherently social and are drawn to working together. In the past, it has been
corporate structure and archaic technology that created artificial barriers to working
together productively.
For example, the terms intranet and extranet were created to help distinguish when
employees could publish information internally and when they could publish externally.
These were often completely different platforms with different security requirements,
training and user groups. Even when the platforms are all the same, such as SharePoint,
the IT complexities and corporate governance made them prohibitively complex for
users and IT departments alike.
The instant something is either too complex or too restrictive to use, users will default to
what they know best – e-mail. So should a good collaboration platform seek to replace
e-mail? Absolutely not. Collaboration is centered on people, not the technology, and
should provide the most convenient way for your employees to work together, wherever
they are and on whatever device they are using. What a good collaboration platform
should do is ensure that conversation retains the context and content associated with it.
The shifts in our global economy have seen the IT industry react with a move toward
highly-scalable, secure and multi-tenanted services rather than the monolithic software
solutions of the past. Cloud computing is the term used to describe the continuing trend
to move services to the Internet. The Internet provides economies of scale in a way
never seen before – allowing companies to leverage vast, commoditized computing
resources at very cost-effective rates.
Tools in the cloud are inherently more flexible and dynamic, allowing your users to
access their data wherever they are in the world securely, provide an IT department
with greatly reduced administration costs and satisfy finance departments by providing
transparent monthly “per user” pricing. In fact, cloud computing has realized an entirely
new business model for procuring IT services. Large up-front capital expenditure
and uncertain and variable operational expenditure, with extortionate maintenance
contracts, has given way to transparent per-user/per-month licensing that can be
scaled up and down as your requirements evolve.
Many legacy software vendors are ‘migrating’ their products to the cloud. This is
often a multi-year strategy with many compromises along the way in functionality and
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4. continued dependencies on client-side software. Worse still, the commercials that
accompany these changes lag even further behind, while they might hide behind a per-
user model, company-wide and multi-year commitments, maintenance contracts and
expensive services engagements are all still present.
Gone are the days of cumbersome security practices, overly-complex software
and confused users. But despite this, many companies continue to implement
‘collaboration’ tools such as Microsoft SharePoint Server. This is a technology unloved
and un-used, that has users scratching their heads and reverting to collaboration via
e-mail, which is a communication rather than a collaboration tool.
SHAREPOINT - A LIMITED AND LIMITING COLLABORATION TOOL
Microsoft’s SharePoint Server currently epitomizes the state of legacy collaboration
tools. It is feature-rich and tries to be many things to many people. Unfortunately, a
‘jack of all trades’ solution means far too much complexity for IT and, more importantly,
confusion for end-users. Adoption of SharePoint installations is typically very low
for users that actively use it to collaborate – and too many of the users that do use
SharePoint, it is little more than a file repository. This is unsurprising, as SharePoint was
originally created to replace shared drives with ‘collaborative’ capabilities bolted on
later.
SharePoint’s licensing is also highly complex, with numerous versions of the server
software and client-side licenses. Additionally, there are minimum requirements on at
least three other Microsoft products with additional licenses if you want to collaborate
externally or open SharePoint up for extranet use.
Legacy-based licensing compounded by poor adoption, means for every employee that
does not adopt SharePoint, either due to usability or internal/external limitations, you
are increasing your average cost per user. With an average adoption rate for SharePoint
at 30-40 per cent, this can effectively double or triple your costs.
For larger companies, deployment can take upwards of six months and even migration
or upgrade from previous versions of SharePoint is not a simple affair, as Microsoft
will recognize. This is often compounded by the pre-requisites that require even more
costly upgrades. For example, Internet Explorer 6 is not supported by SharePoint 2010
– requiring a browser or even operating system upgrade for every user.
Finally, collaboration with external parties is increasingly important in the Internet age
– this could be prospective clients, partner companies, consultants or anyone else that
requires access to information your employees are working on. While SharePoint’s
technology and licensing does not prohibit this, it makes it incredibly difficult and costly
to both procure and deploy external users within the environment.
Microsoft purports that SharePoint Online solves many of these issues but unfortunately
many more still persist. Existing SharePoint deployments often do not migrate into
a cloud environment, as they have been customized in a way that Microsoft cannot
support, while the vanilla SharePoint Online lacks features and capabilities required by
many businesses. Furthermore, Office 365’s new “per-user, per-month” pricing model
has minimum commitments, no fewer than seven versions, on-premise requirements
and still requires third party migration and customization consultancy. External access
is supported, but only for customers coming in via Windows Live ID.
REFERENCES
[1] http://download.microsoft.com/
download/1/9/2/192e73a4-7abb-4bad-b469-
34632d54a8a6/IDC Whitepaper Demonstrating
Business Value.pdf
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5. TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP
One of the most important factors for a CIO in deploying any technology is to
understand what the total cost of ownership (TCO) might be. The cost of the actual
software is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a Microsoft-sponsored whitepaper[1],
software licensing only accounts for seven per cent of the TCO for an on-premise
solution. The hardware, consultancy and training accounts for a further 33 per cent but
by far the largest component is staffing at 60 per cent.
This is often the single biggest ‘hidden’ cost of SharePoint. Beyond the SharePoint-
specific administrators, network and database administrators and security specialists
are all needed for a SharePoint deployment. In larger companies, content and
knowledge managers are often required too.
In order to understand the true TCO, we’ve carried out extensive analysis based upon
a highly-available SharePoint deployment for a mid-sized company (2,500 users). We
analyzed all software components required to deploy (i.e. server/database software) and
necessary (i.e. anti-virus) for an enterprise. We also used the Microsoft whitepaper[2] to
represent the TCO fairly over a 3 year period.
A breakdown of the analysis reveals number startlingly close to Microsoft’s own
estimates:
Staffing continues to be the largest cost associated with SharePoint deployments and
is often the hardest to measure. It is assumed that about seven full-time employees will
be used to run and maintain the SharePoint environment, both from a technical and
content perspective. This includes database administrators, security, networking and
dedicated SharePoint resource, as well as a knowledge manager or a similar business
function.
The next biggest cost was software. This differs to Microsoft’s own estimates that
put software at seven per cent of the TCO. However Huddle’s analysis has included
all software requirements and Software Assurance. Therefore, as part of Software
Assurance and the outsourcing costs, Huddle assumes IT staff training is covered in
these expenses.
Next, there is user downtime risk. This is defined as the cost associated with the
lost productivity of users affected by system downtime. Again, this value will vary
considerably for different companies, but we have estimated that 25 per cent of a
typical workforce will be adversely affected by system downtime. We are also assuming
a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA on SharePoint. This is very high for an on-premise solution, REFERENCES
but we’ve gone with the best to give a fair, baseline estimate. [2] http://download.microsoft.com/
download/1/9/2/192e73a4-7abb-4bad-b469-
34632d54a8a6/IDC Whitepaper Demonstrating
Outsourcing, hardware and ancillary costs make up the rest. This includes all Business Value.pdf
consultancy, servers, remote access, power, SAN/WAN optimization and more that
[3] http://h71019.www7.hp.com/activeanswers/
would be included in a typical enterprise deployment. Hardware prices have been Secure/548230-0-0-0-121.html
supplied by the HP SharePoint Sizer to get an accurate number[3].
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6. HUDDLE - TRUE COLLABORATION
Huddle however, addresses all these issues, offering a genuine and worthwhile
alternative to SharePoint. Licensing is simple, straightforward and transparent with
no hidden costs. Deployment is either instant, allowing users to immediately access
Huddle through a browser, or takes a matter of weeks to integrate with your company’s
Active Directory to enable a more seamless experience for your users.
Huddle even offers a guarantee that within 90 days every participant in the initial user
group will be trained and actively using it, whilst the TCO is far lower than SharePoint,
with no costs for servers, customization and additional licenses.
Perhaps most importantly, users are allowed to collaborate however they like, via the
browser, Microsoft Office, non-Microsoft e-mail clients (such as VMWare Zimbra) or
through mobile access on all major mobile platforms: iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android and
Blackberry. External access can be granted simply and securely by users by specifying
an e-mail address.
So for any CIO keen to deploy a collaboration tool within their business, there are
choices. For many years, the default option has been SharePoint, pushed to an
unwitting workforce because of the following:
• Microsoft Office, a standard in most companies, has close ties to SharePoint
• Technology buyers have been unaware of the alternatives
• SharePoint is a low risk option, made by the world’s largest software company
The emergence of Huddle means that CIOs are no longer reliant on a technology that is
simply not up to the job. In simple terms, if SharePoint was built today, they would’ve
built Huddle.
ABOUT HUDDLE
Established in 2006, Huddle is the leader in cloud content collaboration for the
enterprise. Huddle is used by more than 100,000 business and government
organizations worldwide, including Unilever, AKQA, HTC and Kia Motors, to securely
store, share and collaborate on content with people inside and outside of their
organization.
Huddle can be accessed online, on desktops via Microsoft Office applications and
on the move with BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad apps. It is currently available in 15
languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and
Japanese.
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