Microsoft SharePoint Services vs Xerox DocuShare

gwdibble on groups said :

Hi Jerry - We have a DocuShare 3 installation with about 2800 Collections (like directories - collections contain documents, calendars, or whatever) and 70,000 documents. We've been using DocuShare for about 5 years.

Unfortunately, because we started out with DS before SharePoint existed, most of my experience is with that. I have not used SharePoint much, but more importantly, I don't have any experience with a SharePoint installation that compares in size to our DocuShare install.
Several things come to mind on this topic, and I'll give them to you in no particular order:
- DocuShare is kind of expensive, and IMO you should have it on an annual support contract with Xerox. The cost depends on license quantity and features. A rough guess is that you'd be looking in the low 5 figures for the software, plus a few thousand per year in support. You should be able to easily get a quote for exact figures.
- DocuShare paid support is truly excellent, but there is no peer support I am aware of at all. That said, if you're on a contract with Xerox, you can just as easily call them for support anyway. There is no 24x7 support, it's weekdays until 7 eastern (I think).
- We run DocuShare on its own hardware, and it's pretty beefy hardware (Xeon, 2 GB ram, hardware raid). Unless you're planning a pretty low volume installation, DocuShare will not be happy sharing hardware, particularly with SBS. I used to run it on a low-volume file and print server along with the accounting software and a few other small apps, but since version 3, the hardware requirements are higher and I'm happier with it on its own box.
- It's my impression that DS is simpler for users to learn right out of the box than SharePoint, both for users and admins. Xerox designed it to be self-teaching, so that a new user could just go to the home page and get instructions, configure her own account, add content - just start working with no training. Of course you can tighten up the security much more than that if you wish.
- SharePoint appears to have much more granular control over security. For example, DS has a group called "content managers" who can work with other people's documents (delete, undelete, etc.). Content managers can not be blocked from viewing anything in DS. So by making someone a content manager to save you those minor admin duties, you lose your ability to keep selected content private from that person.
- With SharePoint, depending on your abilities you can change the appearance with built in features, frontpage, etc. With DocuShare, pages are created on the fly using XML-based templates. So you need to know XML if you want to change how things display from the defaults. I'm working with 3rd party consultants to customize templates for my upgrade to DS 4, something I'd be doing in-house if it were SharePoint.
I wish I knew more about SharePoint so I could give you a better comparison.
However, what I would strongly urge you to do is either go to the DocuShare web site and sign up for a demo account on Xerox's server, or download and install the trial version. The demo account idea is simpler - they'll give you a username and password for one collection that you can play with as much as you wish.
The trial version is supposed to be installed on a server. When version 3 came out, I installed it on my XP desktop with a 3ghz P4 and 512 MB ram. It was really slow, and it's unsupported on a workstation (Xerox was amazed it even worked). I had to install IIS for it too. Point being, if you want to try it without doing a server install, you could give it a try on your desktop. They may have put in a block for XP since I did my tests, but it's worth a try if you don't have a server available.
You'll have to sign up for either the trial or the demo, but in my experience, they're not going to start torturing you with sales calls so
that's nothing to worry about.