MSR Consulting TechnoBlog

Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server Differences

June 15th, 2006

Overcoming the cost objections between WSS and SPS

Whenever I am brought into a new client to provide consulting insight on a potential Sharepoint project, I am invariably pulled into a conversation regarding the differences between Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS). To be honest, explaining this in a clear, concise way to a business audience is much harder than one would think it should be. Especially when one of the products in question is effectively ‘free’ and the other carries quite a significant price tag along with it.

Once the pricing has been exposed the questions become “Do I really need SPS?” or “Can I make WSS do what I need instead?”. These questions are being solely driven by cost consciousness at that point, which is not to say that cost shouldn’t be an important part of the decision process, it just shouldn’t be the focal point of the conversation at that stage of the process. Deflecting those questions back to the issues of the business problem you are attempting to solve however, will only work if you can easily explain the product differences in a concise, easy to understand way. Something that quite frankly I used to have a difficult time doing.

Obviously diving into technical topics isn’t going to do you any good at a table full of executives, but you do have to quickly find a way to do a product selection. So I had to train myself to ignore all of the technical mumbo jumbo that starts swimming through my head when those questions are asked, step away from the product, and focus in on the business problems to be solved as the filter through which my answer would have to pertain. (Hopefully you made sense of that convoluted sentence after reading it a few times.) Essentially I needed a way to describe the product differences that directly related to the problem the company was trying to solve….yet be generic enough that it applied to all potential Sharepoint customers.

Those who know me will be the first to tell you that being concise is not my strong point. I can ramble on and on about the most seemingly mundane topics. On topics that I am passionate about I feel it’s a disservice to throw out a quick elevator speech while skipping over all of the other wonders of the topic. As you can imagine, not everyone on the other end of my diatribes is always as passionate though so I continually have to remind myself to shut up and get on with it. Therefore, this exercise in summing up the WSS / SPS difference from a business problem perspective was more difficult for me than it should have been. In the end however, here is what I ended up with:

Collaboration vs. Aggregation

WSS is about collaboration. The act of storing and sharing information between groups of people. Whether a team, a department, or the entire organization.

SPS is about Aggregation. The act of compiling and storing information across multiple sources into a meaningful whole.

The products are extremely complimentary, in fact SPS uses WSS for a great deal of its functionality and is effectively built on top of it. This tight integration is one of the things that makes describing the differences in the products so difficult. In a general sense you can think of WSS as a means for creating and storing your content, whereas SPS provides the means of intelligently storing all of that WSS information so that you can easily navigate and search through it in multiple ways.

Once you have laid out that conceptual foundation, and the distinction between collaboration and aggregation is clear, you should be able to begin laying out the business objectives into these two categories. Now we are back to a productive conversation instead of just focusing on price.

Depending upon your audience you will likely want to be slightly more granular now and begin slicing and dicing the information you have just categorized into more meaningful sub-categories of functionality. Because there is a lot of overlap in functionality between WSS and SPS this will help to drive your audience closer to the answer of which product will best suit their needs. To do this however we need to map out some more functionality of the two products, but still do so in a way that a business user could understand it.

In my research I came across this little chart from Microsoft off of the MSDN site that does provide some high-level functional differences. The grid that I use in our consulting practice is much more involved and slightly different but this one will do fine as an example. We never show the business audience the grid itself though, it’s still too technical and invites too much discussion about issues that wouldn’t be helpful. Instead what we do is use these feature differences as a source for well structured business questions. We then ask those questions in a specific sequence to the business owners and the answers give us enough information to determine if a certain piece of functionality is needed or not. We have fields in our grid for placing a checkmark if it’s required, and the business problem that it solves for the client from the answer we were given.
For example, you might structure a question to the business user that gives you immediate insight into whether or not ‘Audience’ functionality in SPS would be required to acheive it. OK, I probably shouldn’t have used ‘Audience’ functionality as an example since there are many of us out there that would have a hard time explaining that functionality as well. Perhaps ‘Enterprise Search’ capability would be a better example. I won’t go into the question grid that we use here but if you’re interested just leave a comment and I’d be happy to expound on them. It’s not a state secret or anything.
The point here is that with a well thought out approach, and some lists of functionality and business questions you can still easily decide which of these two products is going to be the right choice for any given situation. You still face the hurdle of overcoming price objections, but at that point you will have well reasoned answers to back up the recommendation that are directly related to specific business problems. And if the recommendation is to use SPS and they desire to not bite the bullet, you have a ready-made list of functionality that also has to be thrown out or replaced by some other means.

As a side-note here. You will find that overcoming price objections in the way stated isn’t how it always works in the real world. These days there are so many small software companies providing extensions to WSS functionality that it’s entirely possible you may still provide all of the desired functionality for the project with a combination of WSS and 3rd party commercial toolsets. This is a perfectly reasonable outcome, but I caution you to be aware of the pitfalls of extending WSS functionality with 3rd party software. You will need to do highly technical due diligence and testing on that software to insure future compatibility with updates, upgrades, etc., etc. The first time you use such a product the costs involved in that due diligence may be prohibitive. But that is a topic for another day.

All of this begs the question, is SPS priced appropriately? Personally, I think it’s high for the Small to Medium business market because of the baseline cost, but priced well for the Enterprise. I think a better pricing model would be paid client licensing only with the server license being free. Personally, I believe Microsoft is missing out on available revenue in the 25-200 person businesses with their existing pricing model. But the reality is that I believe WSS is such an extremely powerful piece of software, and therefore such a great value to be included for free that it makes SPS seem so expensive given the small number of features that it brings to the table over WSS. Those few features though are incredibly important, and I think few businesses would argue that the end product of a SPS site is well worth the price. In other words, I believe that if a business either didn’t know about WSS, or if WSS was available at a price of say half of SPS that the issue of cost justification for SPS wouldn’t be nearly so contentious.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings

MSR Consulting

Entry Filed under: Sharepoint, Internet Business Tools, Sharepoint Portal Server, Consulting