ADXstudio vs SharePoint for Dynamics CRM

Microsoft buys ADXstudio. I believe this is a known fact to all.

How does it compare to SharePoint. Why use ADXstudio over SharePoint and why not? I'll try and answer these questions here.

Grant McLarnon wrote a great post on why use ADX portals over SharePoint providing you six reasons. It's a great place to give you a head start. What I'm going to focus on is not the technical bit but from a business stand point.

ADXstudio is a great portal solution which provides OOB customer portal, partner portal, community portal, content management and profile management features. All these features are licensed under a single license. You only need to license per CRM organization and not user based. On the other hand, SharePoint is user based licensing and all these features mentioned above have to be manually developed which is time consuming and increases cost.

ADXstudio however, doesn't offer rich document management features like version control, metadata definition of documents, document collaboration and sharing between team members, views and filtering options. With a powerful search engine on SharePoint, looking for documents is much easier even if you don't remember the location of the document within SharePoint. Now it's even better with Office web apps, one can open and edit documents online without having a desktop client for word, powerpoint or excel.

While ADXstudio provides you with certain portal features to meet specific business requirements, SharePoint on the other hand is a clean slate where your imagination is the limit.

In this blog I'm not trying to promote ADX portals or SharePoint, but only helping you make informed decisions. You would really need to vet the options before implementing one over the other.