The Clash of the Titans!

It promised to be an epic. In the Sharepoint Corner, Riaz Ahmed a true believer in and Official Evangelist for The Redmond Way. Opposing him, speaking in the EPiServer interest, the notorious self-proclaimed techno-hippy Jon Marks. Between them, the celebrated Mr Kite, AKA LBi’s shy and retiring Editorial Director, Duncan Arbour. The scene was set for mortal combat, blood, mayhem, alarums, cries of havoc and no holds barred, yeah!

‘Hang on’, you might be  - ought to be - saying, ‘you’re talking about content management systems, right? What’s epic about that?’ And you’d have a point. On the face of it, CMS preference is a fairly functional, unemotional kind of decision or averral. Does it meet tech, user and financial requirements - typically a series of masive lists, to be scored impartially, the scores totted up and the highest score wins - simple.

Nevertheless, passions do run deep. LBi works with all the big CMSs, but over the past couple of years there has been a marked perfrence’ largely client driven perfrence for Sharepoint and EPiServer implementations. This speaks well of the marketing efforts of both businesses, but how good are their products?

Speaking from an editor’s point of view - well, let’s just say that WordPress trounces both; but then again it does one job really and doesn’t try to do anything else. The bigger a CMS gets the more difficult it becomes for it to stick to doing the one job of managing content. EPiServer makes a respectable fist of it, and it’s getting better all the time - but it has its limitations. SharePoint can do a great deal more than simply manage content - its document management capabilities, for example, are as powerful as anything else on the market. But this comes at the price of complexity, and less focus - and therefore less ease, simplicity and effort - on pure content management - or ‘publishing’, as oldsters like me still enjoy calling it.

How did the debate go? It was all quite tame, after the Titanic build-up. We were expecting there to be blood, given some of the advance questions, and naked insults, that were submitted prior to The Session. Instead, we heard two well-argued, informative presentations, and then had a polite, and again very informative discussion about the relative merits and demerits of each system. Jon probably won on points, but it was no KO. I probably came away from it feeling more positively about SharePoint than I did going in, and I still think EPiServer’s a great CMS for a certain level of web site. The fact that the two work together pretty well under the right circumstances probably indicates that the motion and its marketing message were probably the wrongest thing about the debate.

Key learning? Use the right tool for the job. Basic, decent CMS: EPiServer. More complex portal implementaion, especially intranets? SharePoint all the way. Worth finding out? Certainly? Worthy of its billing as a bloody fight to the bitter end? A bit over the top, possibly.

After the session, Duncan and Jon (above) went on to the FaceBook Developers Garage, where Duncan successfully impersonated Eddie van Halen (below) - “They definitely thought I was him,” he reports confidently (he actually believes this, people, I’m worried) - and certainly created some kind of an impression.

Aside of guitar hero antics, however, neither he nor Jon seem to be able to give a coherent account of what actually happened… Luckily, others can, and have.