I have been doing a lot of comparison of the Sharepoint offerings available today, and came across Bob German’s editorial on the topic. While I was looking for comparisons of Sharepoint as a Platform on Azure to Sharepoint on premise, I came to understand there is a completely different capability, regardless of where it is hosted; Sharepoint as a Service.
Sharepoint as a platform may be hosted in AWS, Azure, other hosting options, or on premise. This includes the whole stack of the Sharepoint technology, allowing you to build and customize your user experience for your organization. It will always look like Sharepoint, even if custom branding is applied. Moreover, the more of the out of the box customizable features you use, which, at a later time are often deprecated, makes it more difficult to adapt newer versions, if you have too much customization.
There is, however, another Sharepoint alternative: Sharepoint as a Service. Sharepoint as a service provides all the persistence capabilities for everything Sharepoint. It exposes the site contents through RESTful services. This requires you to build all of the necessary user interfaces, or system integrations. However, your Sharepoint data would no longer need to look like a Sharepoint site. You could still have your collaboration, lists, documents, and much more, available as a service. Your Sharepoint data could be configured to be available on small devices using code such as Angular, or Cordova.
What is really cool is that you are not restricted to a single approach. You can use Sharepoint as a Service and as a Platform. You then have the user interfaces already available in Sharepoint, right out of the box. You also have the ability to expose the same Sharepoint contents through RESTful services. How you interact with the site simply depends on the needs of your customers. Build what you need; use what is already been done. Mix and match.
Take a look at Bob’s blog for a more thorough review on the topic.
Cheers,
Ben