Free SharePoint?
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@coliver said in Free SharePoint?:
@Shuey Look at Alfresco. https://www.alfresco.com/
That's pretty much the standard answer.
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@scottalanmiller said in Free SharePoint?:
@momurda said in Free SharePoint?:
@scottalanmiller That's really great. Now my boss wont ask me to make a SP server if i tell him itll cost thousands of dollars. And i will be happy.
Yup, the last, highly limited free version was FOUR years ago. At this point, even that one is old enough that it sounds like a bad idea for a new deployment.
That's not that old. I don't think it deserves writing in upper case
It's under mainstream support until 2018. I'd be more concerned about still using SQL Server 2008 with it. Now that is old, and expensive to upgrade.We're using 2013 Foundation. I've never ran into limitations that bother me, it's a great product. We are moving to Sharepoint Online in the next 12 months though. If you're used to free, and you don't use O365 already, the $60 per user per year may sting a bit, especially if you don't really need the extra features versus Foundation and you already have SQL Server on-premise.
I imagine that migrating a 250+ user Sharepoint server to Alfresco is a massive project. Good luck.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Free SharePoint?:
@scottalanmiller said in Free SharePoint?:
@momurda said in Free SharePoint?:
@scottalanmiller That's really great. Now my boss wont ask me to make a SP server if i tell him itll cost thousands of dollars. And i will be happy.
Yup, the last, highly limited free version was FOUR years ago. At this point, even that one is old enough that it sounds like a bad idea for a new deployment.
That's not that old. I don't think it deserves writing in upper case
It's under mainstream support until 2018. I'd be more concerned about still using SQL Server 2008 with it. Now that is old, and expensive to upgrade.We're using 2013 Foundation. I've never ran into limitations that bother me, it's a great product. We are moving to Sharepoint Online in the next 12 months though. If you're used to free, and you don't use O365 already, the $60 per user per year may sting a bit, especially if you don't really need the extra features versus Foundation and you already have SQL Server on-premise.
I imagine that migrating a 250+ user Sharepoint server to Alfresco is a massive project. Good luck.
Using something with six months of support left is.... questionable. Deploying something new that will be out of support before you are done installing it though.....
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Using 2013 still today with a plan to update seems just fine. Rolling it out now seems crazy. No support from day one. Dead product with no future. That'll be a major problem very quickly.
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I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!
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Plone is another option to look at too.
Bitnami offers a quick and easy way to install or test plone
Bitnami offers a quick and easy way to install or test alfresco
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@Carnival-Boy said in Free SharePoint?:
I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!
Getting the services installed is much different than it being ready for production. Even if you moved fast as hell on it, 3 months would be hard to achieve to get something like this in any actually useful production.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Free SharePoint?:
I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!
I mostly agree. Although in this case, the decision to kick that down the road in this way had the most value in 2013 and has diminished since then with it falling off a cliff in a few months. Totally basing current decisions on the past three years is a little like sunk cost thinking, but something made 2013 not useful until now - what would make it suddenly so valuable to change that decision at a time when the general value is plummeting.
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@IRJ said in Free SharePoint?:
@Carnival-Boy said in Free SharePoint?:
I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!
Getting the services installed is much different than it being ready for production. Even if you moved fast as hell on it, 3 months would be hard to achieve to get something like this in any actually useful production.
True. That's very fast.
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I've been thinking a lot about this and have an idea:
We've been using this server for the last 5 years without any support, and without any on-site staff who know how to manage it (other than the daily backups I do). So I'm considering two options:- Perform a P2V of the server and host it in our existing VMware environment.
- Build a new virtual member server in our existing VMware environment and migrate the data from the existing WSS 3.0 server to the new VM (using the same versions of everything; Server 2008 R2, WSS 3.0 and SQL Server 2008).
I'd prefer to go with option 1, but I've never virtualized a DC, so I'd like to hear some feedback on what you guys think of this and if there are any specifics I need to be aware of when virtualizing the existing DC.
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@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:
I've been thinking a lot about this and have an idea:
We've been using this server for the last 5 years without any support, and without any on-site staff who know how to manage it (other than the daily backups I do). So I'm considering two options:- Perform a P2V of the server and host it in our existing VMware environment.
- Build a new virtual member server in our existing VMware environment and migrate the data from the existing WSS 3.0 server to the new VM (using the same versions of everything; Server 2008 R2, WSS 3.0 and SQL Server 2008).
I'd prefer to go with option 1, but I've never virtualized a DC, so I'd like to hear some feedback on what you guys think of this and if there are any specifics I need to be aware of when virtualizing the existing DC.
Virtualize is always highly recommended.
The VMware P2V converter is kind of clunky but it works. You will have to put a client on the machine that you want to virtualize, make a few settings, tell it where you want it to go, and press start. Typically you want to shutdown the old one after it is done converting if you start up the virtual after completion.
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@NerdyDad Cool, I've already done a successful V2V of another server months ago and it was pretty slick (as well as some P2Vs of other servers). I've never run into any problems and can see this as being a good way to go.
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@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:
I'd prefer to go with option 1, but I've never virtualized a DC
Do it offline, not hot. That's about the only major thing to know about P2V of DCs.
Really though, you might want to rethink the plans here. First off, it's trivially easy to deploy a new DC, so why keep around an ancient install when you can clean up your environment. Second, you are running "critical" services on the same box as your DC, not to mention you have SQL Server installed on it as well. That is strictly verboten by Microsoft. Dumb is dumb. Now is the time to fix it all up.
What are you running in Sharepoint? Flat repository? Full workflow? Customized templates? This is what makes the determination of where you need to go with it. Most of the people I've seen with this kind of setup are using it as a glorified file system with a minor amount of workflow in it. Would take me about an hour to migrate it to even the newest version or 365.
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@PSX_Defector I've never done a cold P2V :-/... do you have any extra info on how to do this?
I have no need to deploy a new DC; I already have another one in this same ADSS site. I totally realize the way it's currently setup is seriously jacked up, so I'd be happy to get it all fixed up.
The two major road-blocks to getting this accomplished are:
- Upper management doesn't want to spend what it would cost to either get us out to the cloud (via O365)
- We don't have anyone on our team with the necessary skills to do the migration, so we'd have to pay someone to do it for us (and it would have to be migrated to the same version to keep the cost as low as possible).
One of the possible benefits to do the P2V is that, if we ever run into an issue where the virtual server takes a dump and it can't be restored, upper management would likely be forced to pay for a more modern replacement.
I'm not sure how our current SharePoint is setup or used :-/... I didn't setup and I don't manage it.
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I missed the point of the DC. I would just decom the DC, then P2V the rest of the host. If you need a secondary DC then just spun up another VM and dcpromo it.
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@NerdyDad The problem with this option (which has prevented me from doing that all along) is the fact that this server was promoted to a DC and then had SharePoint installed. If we demote the DC, SharePoint will stop working :(.
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@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:
@NerdyDad The problem with this option (which has prevented me from doing that all along) is the fact that this server was promoted to a DC and then had SharePoint installed. If we demote the DC, SharePoint will stop working :(.
Might need to ask the SharePoint admin what DC it is looking at, but I don't think it is going to matter. As long as the SP server is in the same domain as a DC, it should pull the information that it needs. I'd check DNS records to see if it can access another DC.
Disclaimer: I haven't touched SharePoint 2013 since probably 2013. So I do not recall how that works with user objects, files objects, and permissions.
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@NerdyDad said in Free SharePoint?:
@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:
@NerdyDad The problem with this option (which has prevented me from doing that all along) is the fact that this server was promoted to a DC and then had SharePoint installed. If we demote the DC, SharePoint will stop working :(.
Might need to ask the SharePoint admin what DC it is looking at, but I don't think it is going to matter. As long as the SP server is in the same domain as a DC, it should pull the information that it needs. I'd check DNS records to see if it can access another DC.
Disclaimer: I haven't touched SharePoint 2013 since probably 2013. So I do not recall how that works with user objects, files objects, and permissions.
If you promote an Exchange server to a DC, you cannot demote it. This is likely something similar.
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@JaredBusch @NerdyDad Jared is absolutely right. This is the scenario I read about in multiple posts online (including a separate thread on Mangolassi). Because SharePoint (WSS 3.0) was installed on a DC, demoting the DC would break the SharePoint functionality :(.
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Well that sucks.
