SharePoint Foundation 2013 Document Management

Question

I have a company that needs a document management system.

I have looked at SharePoint but it has far to many bells and whistles. The company wants something that doesn't have intranet portals, app downloads and all the other waffle (they simple don't have the skill nor the inclination to spend thousands learning it).

I am finding that SharePoint is a little like a fork-lift bus truck car. It trying to be everything to everybody which usually ends up useless to all.

My question is does SharePoint Foundation work out of the box as a document management system or is it like an engine you put your own code upon.

The more I read through Google the more conflicting information I come across without any clear definitions.

What I want to end up with is a document management system that has authentication and a simple page / screen / whatever to link / admin to those documents.

As per usual Ill probably end up having to write my own but it would be nice to not keep re-inventing the wheel.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 05 '14 at 22:31

SharePoint definitely has a learning curve, there's no getting away from that. However you don't need to set up all the "bells and whistles" if you just want a basic DMS.

To answer your question, you don't need your own code to get a SharePoint site up and running. You will however need to spend quite a lot of time figuring out what configuration you need for your needs.

We're using SharePoint 2010 Foundation as a simple document repository in a couple of web apps and it works fine. No Wikis, no versioning, no custom pages. That stuff is availablem but we don't need it so we don't enable it. The nice thing about it is the security which hooks into AD so authentication can be set up easily and it is robust. Our DMS solutions are accessed via the internet by users, and internally by apps, and SharePoint can handle that fine by setting up alternate access mapping so that you can get to documents via internal and external URLs.

I won't lie; I've spend a lot of long days cursing SharePoint, but it's still a far better solution than what I could have come up with myself.

In case your wondering, we're using 2010 rather than 2013 because we had been using WSS 3.0 up until this year and you can't upgrade directly from WSS to 2013. But since we only need the basics, doing a second upgrade to 2013 wasn't worth the effort.

When you say 'A couple of web apps' are these created by yourself or apps out of the box? — William Humphreys, Aug 05 '14 at 23:04
They're bespoke multi-server, n-tier apps with a web front-end. The kind that keeps a small dev team occupied for 6 months to a year :) — DeanOC, Aug 06 '14 at 00:31

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 08 '16 at 00:17

The truth is Sharepoint can be used as a sort of document management system (ish). But in truth it is far to over complicated and has gone rather off at a tangent from the demos I was original given when it first came about in the beginning. Alfresco an Nuxio are probably much better. (but even they have their issues). You simple have to look at all three and make your own decisions as now I know this is not a simple question. I personally went for Alfresco but for very exact reasons, even it has some issues but generally speaking it is the best(ish) out of the three. (Nuxio would of been best except for its 'purchase your admin interface' model.

SharePoint Foundation 2013 Document Management

2 Answers2