Image by yonmacklein via Flickr

Collaboration is the key to today's business and technology makes collaboration easier. Many businesses rely on Microsoft's Windows Sharepoint Services for their collaboration needs. But, in my opinion, it is way too expensive and old fashioned. Till sometime back, if someone recommended Wikis as an alternative to Windows Sharepoint Services, complaints will pop up immediately about comparing Apples with Oranges. Critics will point out to powerful Document Management features of Sharepoint. I wouldn’t say that such criticisms are completely invalid. In fact, a pure wiki, as it existed till sometime back, was indeed a plain collaboration tool with no document management capabilities. Times have changed and, now, there are various SaaS solutions that offers wiki based collaboration with integrated document management options.

Now Windows Sharepoint Services also has wiki like feature built in and we can, safely, compare Windows Sharepoint Services with Wiki offerings by various vendors like Pbwiki, MindTouch’s Dekiwiki, Socialtext, etc.. It is no more a comparison of Apples with Oranges. IT departments are considering Wiki based solutions to replace Sharepoint implementations because of the cost considerations and also other frustrations. Instead of a Sharepoint implementation, a company can either have on-premise implementations of MindTouch’s Dekiwiki, Alfresco’s open source collaboration software, etc. or on-demand SaaS offerings like Pbwiki, Central Desktop, etc.. The options available for businesses are plenty without any need to be at the mercy of expensive vendors.

However, if a business has too much inertia to move to a Wiki based solution or has a specific need that requires the implementation of Windows Sharepoint Services, they can still do it without investing heavily on the server and network infrastructure. They can tap into the clouds for their infrastructure needs. Such an implementation will save huge amounts of money on the capex side and also offer instant scalability without any delay and without any need for additional hardware resources.

In October, Amazon announced the availability of Windows EC2 instances and it is now available for users to run Sharepoint Services on these EC2 instances. This post gives a step by step tutorial on how one can run Sharepoint Services on Windows EC2 instances. This should help those people wedded to Sharepoint Services to save pennies during this recession economy.

Thanks to Jeff Barr for the tweet with the link to the tutorial.

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