Hi
Dead simple - but genuine question - is Sharepoint 2013 fit for production use?
We are working on SP 2013 project for an SME with a small budget. We are coming against so many difficulties and issues with SP2013 that is becoming intensely frustrating and difficult to progress the project (even though the project requirements themselves are pretty straight forward).
We invested in SP2013 on the basis that it would make it easy to build a simple Document Storage and Records Management solution. Our view was, there is a market leading product here that people use for exactly this requirement, so why re-invent the wheel?
However, had we started from scratch and just build a pure ASP.NET application, I think we would have the project done and dusted by now (i.e. 6 months in at the moment) Yet with SP2013 we have encountered nothing but roadblocks:
1) Incredibly difficult and time-consuming to build very simple workflow constructs (Check-In a record, Declare a Record when an Item is created, Upload a Document larger than 20MB etc.)
2) Big administration and security headaches (We have a MS Support Engineer now trying to resolve an Office Web Apps Server integration issue for over 4 months and counting, with no resolution in sight; We are having constant problems with Claims Authentication; Crawling services continually fail etc. )
3) Simple performance issues. We are running on a 2-server farm with 32GB++ total RAM and very good hardware, including 8 cores on each box. Despite this, we are plagued by "pre-compilation" delays, ie. it can take up to 30 seconds to initially load a page, and sometimes they won't load at all; response times are very poor; we have worked hard on numerous "warm-up" scripts all to no avail, etc.
So...setting aside the rant, the question is a genuine one. Working with a small organisation with only a limited amount of development dollars, have we completely chosen the wrong product here? Is it the case that in order to build a reliable, fast, efficient but small-scale and basic Sharepoint solution, you need a minimum development fund of say, $250,000 or more? We have burned through maybe $70k so far on development, I would guess, and we are still faced with nothing but problems and nowhere near the end.
So what I am getting at here is.... Is $100,000 development budget simply not enough to build a small-scale solution based on Sharepoint 2013? Or have we simply chosen a product that is simply not yet fit for production use?
I would really like to know what others are experiencing out there, as I am just not sure whether the problem is entirely on our side, or whether, we have made the mistake of adopting SP2013 too early etc.
I appreciate it is difficult to ask for guidance without going into additional specifics, but I am just looking for a general guide as to what other people are doing and what kind of successes they are having, if any. If lots of other people have been able to build good SP2013-centric solutions at around the $100,000 mark, then clearly we are doing something wrong. On the other hand, I am honestly beginning to wonder if by investing in SP2013, we have simply bitten off a lot more than we can chew, and that we're not going to ever get a decent solution in place without spending, say, fives times as much, in which case, we really need to perhaps consider not throwing good money after bad.
The scale of the project we are trying to put together, is a simple records management Site, with around 10 document libraries and 3 or 4 search pages, for a group of 15 end users - that is literally the entire size of it.
I would really appreciate it if anyone is carrying out similar size projects, whether you have been successful with SP2013 and what sort of spend you had, etc.?