Alternative to SharePoint

A product built to inform, not to publish

Microsoft’s official documentation on how to plan a Communication Site in SharePoint is clear about the product’s purpose: unlike a Team Site, built for collaborating on content creation, a Communication Site exists for readers to read — not for a team to create and convert.

Tufts University, in its internal IT guide, translates this into an everyday example: a Communication Site is for broadcasting news to a wide community with few editors publishing — not for many teams collaborating at once.

That’s the inverse of the pattern for a university recruitment website. With recruitment, you need many people — program coordinators, admissions, faculty communications — to be able to publish, and to do so in order to convert visitors into applications, not just to inform.

Why the architecture doesn’t help

There’s a technical reason behind this friction, and it’s no minor detail.

SharePoint doesn’t automatically process images at different sizes, nor does it let you choose a focal point for crops — features any modern CMS handles out of the box. Its page-rendering model comes from an era before the component-based development that dominates today’s web, which complicates any brand customization and creates constant conflicts between SharePoint’s own CSS and the university’s.

The result, according to a web development analysis, is that using SharePoint as an intensive CMS demands “a solid programming team that knows the software inside out”. That’s exactly the opposite of what a marketing team wanting to publish autonomously needs.

The “it’s already included” mirage

Many universities land on SharePoint for the same reason: it’s already paid for within the Microsoft 365 license. It looks free.

It’s the same mirage as open-source software that promises zero license cost: the cost doesn’t disappear, it shifts. In SharePoint it shifts to the custom development needed to process images, adapt the design or build reasonable approval workflows — work that a CMS built for public publishing already has solved.

Griddo is a DXP designed specifically for universities, with marketing and communications publishing as its central use case — not as an afterthought bolted onto a tool built for something else.

The Live Author Experience lets you edit, see the result in real time and publish, without installing anything and without depending on who has access to a particular computer. The preview covers every screen format, so the question of whether a page looks good on mobile stops being a last-minute worry.

The Embedded Design System solves the customization problem that SharePoint pushes onto the developer: every page respects the university’s visual identity automatically, with no brand review rounds. And Griddo’s media manager processes and optimizes images into the required formats and sizes the moment they’re uploaded — the feature SharePoint doesn’t offer out of the box.

Approval workflows exist when a university needs them, but they’re configured by stage and by role, not by default on every image. And structured content — news, events, programs — is updated once and reflected across every site where it appears, instead of having to replicate it page by page.

This isn’t the first time a university has solved this same bottleneck. Pablo Landaluce, Head of Communications at CUNEF Universidad, describes it this way after migrating from their previous platform (WordPress, not SharePoint, but with the same symptom of IT dependence): they publish programs ten times faster than before.