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Hello Megan,
At Royal Pavilion & Museums we also used to run a Sharepoint website. I’d agree with all the comments previously made – even simple page edits could feel like
trying to defuse a bomb.
We switched to a Wordpress site back in 2015, and it was a huge improvement. Much cheaper to develop and maintain, and it’s very easy to train a wider group
of staff to use it.
As we’re also a local authority museums service, I’d happy to share costs and other data off-list that might help you persuade the Council to switch.
Cheers,
Kevin
Kevin Bacon
Digital Manager
Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove
4-5 Pavilion Buildings
Brighton
BN1 1EE
Tel: 01273 292817
Email:
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http://brightonmuseums.org.uk
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From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Linda Ellis
Sent: 12 June 2018 16:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Sharepoint vs. Wordpress
When I worked for Wolverhampton City Council we won the argument of why we needed to have a website that wasn't on the council's cms because we wanted to put our collections online, the council's cms couldn't support that and so we got
approval. Had to make the case for why we wanted to put collections online (widening / improving access etc, etc) but it was relatively straight forward to argue the case.
Later on we wanted to do partnership working with other museums and archives nearby and having our own website made it so much easier for us.
Linda Ellis
On 12 June 2018 at 16:03, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi
Don’t, whatever you do, use SharePoint in this role if you can avoid it
Fundamental reasons:
- it’s awful for editors. Absolutely awful. And if there is any point at all in having a CMS’d website, it’s “to make things easier for editors”.
- it’ll be tragically and hugely expensive. Even if you apparently have internal resource, you’ll find the normal “you’re just not a priority” responses from the IT dept 6
months down the line. If you ever look to outsource this, you’ll more than likely find SharePoint developers at about £1500 a day.
- you’ll never own it - JO’s point about it not being O/S is fairly critical
- you just can’t start small and build up. WordPress is brilliant at this, and in fact you’ll probably find the same with mature made-for-purpose O/S content management systems
- same as above really, but there will come a day when you’ll need a shop, or ticketing, or a calendar or whatever - and being in a position where you can approach an open
market and ask those questions is going to be really important.
Website costs: I’ll email you off-list. So much “it depends” (my facetious answer is: “how much is a house?”) - but basically it’ll depend on 1) complexity of design, 2) technical
integration and 3) amount of (and complexity of) content that needs to be migrated.
cheers
Mike
ps { In fact, in my humble opinion, don’t use SharePoint in
any role… if you absolutely have to AND you’ve got resource AND support AND knowledge internally AND budget to keep it going AND are ok with something with a dogs-arse user interface…. then it’ll make an OK-ish document repository, and it’s integration
with Office is quite clever at times.…but really, just don’t. }
_____________
Mike Ellis
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency
** NEW:
http://wpformuseums.com for people using WordPress in museums **
** Workshops, courses and free downloads:
http://trainingdigital.co.uk **
On 12 Jun 2018, 15:52 +0100, Jeremy Ottevanger <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:
Hi,
Tragically SharePoint was, in fact, built to be a CMS - at least, Microsoft's CMS 2002 was integrated into/replaced by SharePoint 2007 (IIRC) which was supposed to be able to do the same job
and serve as a CMS as well as a document managment system. But Dee is right, it sucks at that job, or it certainly did when I last looked at it. Whilst you can develop your own code around it, it's not open source and that will always limit what you can do.
At least as importantly, but not unrelated, the community of developers around it is nothing compared to that which you can call on to develop the well-known open source CMSes like WordPress and Drupal. You can always find a new developer to help you rather.
That same community also means that there is a galaxy of plugins/modules/themes/skins available for free, which will give you a massive leg-up.
There are many open source CMS beyond
WordPress and Drupal, but the former would be a really sensible first stop. You will find candidate plugins for all that you want to achieve, but if you want to do something different you'll
find plenty of people who can develop it for you, including on this very list. Plus hosting is pretty cheap and again with loads of options.
Good luck!
Jeremy
Dr Jeremy Ottevanger
Director, Sesamoid Consulting Limited