IT/Cloud software question

[SmallBee]

Clever internet people! I need your help.

At work, we currently use a cloud desktop portal called Citrix. It’s a bit slow but it suits us very well as it allows our (small) team to work remotely on laptops or to come into the office and use their PCs. It can be a bit slow at times and our offsite IT provider are now encouraging us to move on to something called Sharepoint.

However – as far as I can see, Sharepoint seems to be wildly different and more like a file sharing system/dropbox style thing. I don’t think it would be a like for like transfer and I am concerned that IF we use sharepoint instead, we’ll have to have loads of extra applications and security on our PC's and laptops, it will cost tons more and generally be less secure.

I’m sure the IT people wouldn’t recommending something that different though, so clever internet people, what am I missing? Is Sharepoint actually an amazing cloud based remote working service?

Tell me what to do clever internet people!!

Citrix have a number of products. Without knowing which one you are using it is difficult to advise. Is it Citrix ShareFile or something else?

I think it's just called Virtual Desktop but I'll have a closer look when I'm at my desk.

The two products are very different.

Citrix Virtual Desktop allows you to connect to a virtual machine (i.e. it isn't a real machine) running on a server. One server can run many virtual machines. This can make life easy for the IT department and means that users can have cheaper, older PCs. It also used to reduce the number of software licenses you needed - if you had 100 users but only 80 were logged in at any one time, you could get away with 80 licenses. However, Office 365, along with many other major applications, is now licensed to named users. So if you have 100 users you need 100 licenses regardless of how many are working at a time. Another down side of this technology is that all the heavy work is being done by the server on which the virtual machines are hosted with your PC being little more than a dumb terminal, which is a waste of its processing power. Because a server is having to support a lot of virtual machines you need an expensive server with a lot of memory and processing power otherwise performance will be poor. My understanding is that usage of this type of technology is falling.

Sharepoint is a totally different approach. It is indeed fundamentally about file sharing. You can sync folders on Sharepoint with your PC. You can easily go back to old versions of files if you need to. Several people can work on a Microsoft Office document at the same time in Sharepoint. You will need to have applications on your PC. However, if you primarily use Microsoft Office and are already using Office 365 it probably won't make much difference to your license costs, if any. If you are using another version of Office it is more complex but it still isn't necessarily more expensive. Also, you are currently paying for Windows licenses for your PCs so there is no additional cost there and you may save some license costs associated with running Windows on the virtual machines.

If you don't already have antivirus software on your PCs you should get it, regardless of whether you use Citrix or Sharepoint. Antivirus on your Citrix desktop is not enough. You are seriously at risk if you haven't got antivirus on your PCs. And using Sharepoint certainly shouldn't be any less secure than using Citrix.

If you are using Office 365, Sharepoint is included as part of the license so there will be no additional cost there. The net effect is that you will be saving the cost of the Citrix license.

I doubt Sharepoint will cost tons more than your current solution assuming you are licensed correctly. It may even be cheaper. But the licensing situation is complex depending on what products you are using so you need your IT provider to give you a proper cost comparison.

Just to add a personal opinion, having used both, I wouldn't touch Citrix Virtual Desktop with a bargepole if I have the option of using a recent version of Sharepoint! However, I'm sure there will be others who disagree.

Thank you so much, this is really helpful and really clear. It's given me a much better starting point to speak to them with.

I have recent experience of working on both a Citrix virtual desktop and Sharepoint. I’d choose Sharepoint in a heartbeat. It’s so much easier to use.

I'm more familiar with O365, that's the SaaS cloud based offering Microsoft have shifted to in recent years. In fact, it's fair to say it has saved that company from becoming an also-ran, into being back up there with the best in breed.

Customers subscribe to the Service rather than having to purchase licenses. No need to support/maintain infrastructure or have to worry about licenses, you give that burden to companies like Microsoft, Sage, Salesforce, you just buy the right to use their service. Over time they do upgrades, security patches etc.

O365 comprises a bunch of great tools each of which provides dedicated capability. In addition to spreadsheets, word processing and slide presentations, there is also data analytics (PowerBI), data gathering questionnaires (Forms), file store and share (Sharepoint, One Drive) and Teams which pulls all the collaborative tools into one interface 'wrapper' It's all about ability to access data "anywhere anytime any device."

As always with Microsoft it all comes at a price. You can subscribe to a core package the Addins are extras, but from what I know the add ins are eyewateringly expensive!

Office 365 has several different packages you can go for. The one most small businesses go for is Business Premium. That gives you email hosting, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher, Teams (instant messaging, voice calls, video calls, etc.), OneDrive and Sharepoint with 1TB of file storage along with a range of less well-known apps for £9.40+VAT per user per month if you enter into an annual commitment, or £11.30+VAT per user per month with a monthly commitment. There are other things that are expensive (Dynamics, which is their Customer Relationship Management software) but there is an awful lot bundled in the base package.

They're different things we can access Sharepoint files via Citrix (or Shitrix, as it's fondly referred to...)

How well either works, whether together or separately, depends a lot on the configuration. If you have a working alternative to having to use Citrix, that's probably preferable. I think there are usually better alternatives to Sharepoint, too, but as someone upthread says, if it's a recent version it will be an improvement.

There's a lot you can do with Sharepoint, but you need someone who has the time and inclination to find out about the less basic features, and whether that happens tends to vary according to different organisations.