Genuinely asking - is there a Linux alternative to Sharepoint? I couldn't care less if it was lit on metaphorical fire and dumped into the sea, but a lot of orgs using it extensively.
For collaborative documentation, there’s probably a bunch of alternatives.
But SharePoint is the linchpin for Microsoft 365. Well technically SharePoint and Exchange. You can’t use any Microsoft 365 products without SharePoint.
OneDrive uses SharePoint. Outlook Groups and Teams Channels create Microsoft 365 Groups. Every Microsoft 365 Group creates a SharePoint site. Microsoft Loop uses Microsoft SharePoint Embedded.
SharePoint is now a “file and document management system suitable for use in any application”.
So, if you want an alternative to SharePoint you would need an alternative to any M365 Product, including Outlook and OneDrive.
Fun Fact: Teams messages are actually stored via Exchange Mailboxes.
Google Docs and Libre Office both produce compatible documents. There's really no reason to force one or the other.
It's just conflating needs. Document editing and file storage are two different tasks. It's weird that people want everything integrated. It's not much effort to just drag and drop a file into G-Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, box.com...
What people want are systems that compose and work well together. That's what MS provides, or at least attempts to provide, with SharePoint. When you start trying to tack on collaborative document editors, workflow management systems, shared storage, and other capabilities from different providers or systems you run into more and more complications (especially because most of these don't offer any kind of standards compliance that lets them be used interchangeably). That's also why G-Suite works as a competitor to MS, it covers at least the more critical integrations that people want to work smoothly without needing to combine multiple maybe compatible things together.
> I've never been able to properly work on a Word document together with a colleague. Not even once
Many millions of others seem to do it all the time without issue. I've done it practically every day for many years now and haven't run into sync issues for a long time.
It's not made to sync if two people are trying to open the file off a NAS, it's made for people editing files stored in OneDrive/SharePoint.
But as both examples show, you need to have your document editing and document storage closely working together for multi-user live editing to work. That's something that so far practically only integrated editors/storage platforms offer.
Which is so funny because it was a pain in the ass on prem to make sharepoint work for that purpose. Silly item restrictions, complaints about database sizes (which stored the files), etc
Sure. Just saying when that first was brought up in 2007+ and I had to admin it and people loved their folders and searching and such wouldn’t work because if the view sizes.
Nextcloud, particularly with the Collabora Office integration for real-time collaborative document editing. It's got some rough edges but I'd say it suits the majority of use cases now. I suggest spinning up a copy of the community edition in a VM to give it a spin, I was pleasantly surprised. There is a lot of money getting poured in right now as entities outside the US are exploring ways to ditch American software.
Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question, but I can offer some possible insight into why it’s used so much.
We’re on Microsoft 365 and technically fall into the camp of “uses SharePoint”, but only for “shared network folder” usage which OneDrive seamlessly synchronizes should you dislike the web interface. We don’t actively use any other features of it.
Also worth mentioning that realtime collaboration and automatic versioning of Office documents is seamless for files on SharePoint, even if opened on a desktop on a OneDrive synchronized folder.
Files shared over Teams as well as meeting recordings are also stored on SharePoint.
My point is that SharePoint is used a lot but possibly not in the way one might have assumed.
I don’t know if self hosted SharePoint can do all this.
For the file storage/sharing/collaboration part, yeah - there's plenty, and sharepoint arguably sucks even for that.
What trapped a lot of orgs is making use of the whole PowerPlatform around sharepoint. There's a lot of crusty old LoB apps built with MS's no code tools (PowerAutomate, PowerApps) which run on SharePoint as the delivery platform. Some of these even hook into Excel files stored in the various document libraries, etc. There are entire, large business processes being handled by this platform, and so migrating will require actual dev time, which automatically makes it a non-starter for most, unfortunately. Doubly so when you consider that a lot of these "solutions" were built by non-devs, long since gone from the company and no one knows how deep the tentacles go.
> Genuinely asking - is there a Linux alternative to Sharepoint?
Genuinely asking - is there a Microsoft alternative to eBPF, k8s, nginx?
The answer is NO. Alternative to SharePoint is SharePoint. I would argue such project just not needed in general and therefor there is no 'alternative'.
O365 is a poor amalgamation of like 18 different things. Quite frankly I hope there isn't a true "alternative" to it.
The reason orgs use Sharepoint is they are forced to if they use Microsoft. One drive is sharepoint, teams is sharepoint, sharepoint sites is sharepoint, etc...
I'm sure all those things have better alternatives, but Microsoft shoves them down your throat when you license with them.
But it's understandable why an org would prefer that to having to maintain and manage the 18 things, right? It's a hard sell.
I'm not saying that wouldn't be better, but it makes sense why an org would be reluctant. Again, not a fan of Sharepoint myself, but from an org's viewpoint, moving to Linux raises more problems than it solves.
It's understandable, but it doesn't excuse how poorly everything actually works and how confusing it is to use and administrate.
To some extent I think Microsoft is largely in the business of building solutions for problems that don't exist.
Most orgs are probably perfectly fine with a document management system + desktop word application and then a commercial NAS for bulk storage / backups.
