Karsten Grombach’s SharePoint Blog

Not long ago I decided to leave the warmth of my well paid, but somewhat life-consuming consultant job and earn my living on a freelance basis.  I quickly realized that I would be needing my own blog, something colleagues and friends had already encouraged me to do in the past.

This is a report on how I decided which technology to use for my new blog. I had defined the following requirements:

- Ease of use: I want to use Word / Live Writer to write the posts

- I don’t want to learn new technology

- I don’t want to code

- I don’t want to start photoshoping to make my blog look pretty (I have a colour deficiency, so when I photoshop, I’m usually the only one who thinks it’s pretty)

- big community  (Extensibility, Support etc.)

Using SharePoint would have been obvious, but I quickly gave up on that:  50€ /month for having a SharePoint site on some strange domain, which you are not allowed to customize is just to expensive.  My intention was to use Community Kit for SharePoint, as it contains acceptable blogging features, but unfortunately the lower priced hosting providers don’t support the installation of WSPs etc.

So the next candidate was to look a DotNetNuke which has blog module for quite some time now. Since I’ve used DotNetNuke on a few projects and have always liked the concept, I thought it would be  a good idea to work  with something else for a change.
Unfortunately I was put of quite quickly by the performance of DotNetNuke. All DotNetNuke based sites I browsed through, while gathering the bits and pieces (documentation, themes ..) all had this strange lag: The initial response for the page was  quick but it took another 1-3 seconds till the page was fully displayed. What put me off finally, was the fact that DNNs blog module does not support tagging of posts and that you had to install another module to enable Live Writer posting.
[To be fair: At time of writing the performance of the DotNetNuke sites seems to be very good. Maybe they were experiencing high traffic at the time.]

After googling I decided to try out Umbraco, another open-source .net based CMS. The first impression was very good: Very fast, excellent documentation to get you started and very good installer. I had a test site up and running in less than an hour. But when I realized that I would require some tweaking, bit of coding and some desiging to get a blog running,  my enthusiasm dropped rapidly.  To be fair again: I believe that Umbraco team is doing a great job and that you can build flexible and powerful cms solutions using their framework. I’ll definitely have Umbraco in mind when designing future applications.

In sum I had spent nearly two days trying to find something which would suite my needs and still had no blog. As a (nearly) last resort I gave WordPress a try. This is where my dilemma started: WordPress uses PHP and MySQL, technologies a serious SharePoint and .NET developer can only frown at. What convinced me was that it took me less than an hour to set it up and start typing away with live writer: Zero hassle.

I don’t think SharePoint would have been that powerful, even with all the extensions etc. available, but it would’ve gotten the job done. SharePoint is designed to deliver great performance in enterprise scenarios where multiple servers serve on farm. In my situation it would have been overkill.