A large global player in the capital markets and financial services industry was exploring options to replace their Microsoft SharePoint 2010 instance with a modern but cost-effective solution.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 will reach the end of the support in October 2020, leading to a dire need to either upgrade and migrate to the latest version of SharePoint or to replace SharePoint entirely with some inexpensive solution having similar capabilities. It was not recommended to upgrade further to SharePoint 2019 or to the Cloud version as part of Office 365, as Microsoft has charted a different roadmap for these products and hence these latest versions miss some of the desired functionalities. Further, installing SharePoint 2019 or Office 365 would entail a fresh configuration and all processes must be built afresh, coupled with a major effort to migrate all data.

Primary: Replace SharePoint 2010 with less expensive, cost-effective solution(s).

Secondary: customization, scalability, transparency, mobility.

After a thorough research of the solutions landscape, I arrived at six different options.

These included the "do nothing" option (to weigh the risks involved).

There was also the "upgrade to the latest version" option, alongside four other tools from the industry - both proprietary and open source.

I prepared a comprehensive scorecard with multiple parameters to assist in decision making.

The parameters were weighted according to their relative significance basis the client's needs.

Once the different options were populated in the scorecard, their respective scores were entered, checked and re-checked.

The final results were published to the client in the form of two scorecards - one sans cost, and the other including cost.

The client was delighted with the output, and was able to take a timely decision to replace a to-be-obsolete system.