CMS Review – Drupal Vs. SharePoint

Choosing the right content management system for your project depends on the amount of people working on your site, the size of your site and how frequently you will have to access it. There are, of course, many different options available, and in this blog post we are going to look at two different platforms to consider, Drupal and SharePoint. We will weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of each CMS, and look at ways you may be able to use them to get the best out of your website.

What is a CMS?

Firstly, we’ll get back to basics and answer a simple question – what exactly is a content management system?

Essentially a content management system (CMS) allows the user to have full control over the addition of content, editing and organisation of their website through a conventional web browser. Without having to delve into code, a CMS can be entirely customisable and adapted to suit an individual or a business’ needs.

Drupal vs. Sharepoint

Before we look too deeply into a comparison between the two management systems, it would be a good idea to revisit exactly what each system offers its customers.

Released in 2001, Drupal is today considered to be one of the leading content management systems for businesses around the world. Released as an open source project, the software is available for free and comes with an unlimited licence for customisation and re-distribution. This is part of Drupal’s appeal – the ‘building blocks’ approach allows users to have flexibility when it comes to their site.

Microsoft Sharepoint comes from a slightly different perspective. Originally produced and developed as a document management system, it has seen numerous development cycles and iterations to make it into the product it is today. There are many different SharePoint products available from Microsoft to enhance the content management of your website – and much of it is based around the cloud and access of a wide range of information from a wide range of devices.

How popular are Drupal and SharePoint as CMS platforms?

The graph below indicates how successful more recent iterations of Drupal have been. Of all sites running Drupal, Version 7 has 69% of the share – with sites such as Twitter and Weather.com being notable examples that highlight the scalability and size of Drupal’s strengths.

The matrix shown underneath from w3techs.com highlights the market position of Drupal and SharePoint as a CMS – showing that both are preferred by many high traffic sites, even though widespread adoption has not yet occurred to the extent seen by Joomla or WordPress.

Benefits of Drupal

As well as the flexibility and ‘building blocks’ approach mentioned earlier, there are many other benefits to using Drupal for your website

• Wide graphic design capability and possibilities – including responsive design
• Unlimited amount of customisation between the front and back end of your site. The administrator portions of the site can be fully altered to suit your needs
• No limits in terms of scalability
• Intuitive content structure, minimizing the learning curve for new administrators

Benefits of SharePoint

SharePoint is an excellent way to store, share and manage a large amount of documents. It is mainly used for Intranet services and eCMS solutions.

• Flexible and customisable document management
• Cloud services
• Top-down collaboration for large amounts of content
• Best used when treated as a database rather than a ‘one size fits all’ CMS solution.

It has been argued by many developers that using Drupal and SharePoint combined will yield the best results from a CMS system – although of course as with any content management system carefully consideration will be needed to ensure you are getting the best from any platform you decide to use.

In many cases should you wish to use SharePoint exclusively as content management system for your website, significant workarounds and add ons will have to be installed. Where is does excel however is in document management and collaboration – you can easily keep track of who is creating and sharing what within your system, and it is therefore highly useful to internal systems, such as the Intranet within organisations, for example.

Summary

Choosing the right CMS can determine to a large extent how you wish to use your site, and how you wish your site to be grown and scaled in the future. Both SharePoint and Drupal have enormous benefits to the users in terms of content management – and Drupal in particular has many customisable options to benefit your site as it grows. If, however, you are looking for a CMS that provides first-class document management, for instance if you are building an Intranet site, then SharePoint is becoming an increasingly obvious choice.

If you need any help choosing your CMS, expert web developers and content management experts can point you in the right direction and in the long run save you time, money and energy migrating. If you make the right decision from stage 1, you are likely to have an excellent and long-term relationship with your CMS.