FREE Alternative to SharePoint

By: Justin Ferriman • April 24, 2012
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Here is a great free resource for those of you who need to store, and share, large files.  For those of us in the learning community, we know that the courses, training documents, and other files can become very large in a short amount of time.

In some cases you may want to store your files for personal use to free up your diskdrive, while others of you may want to have a centralized place for your team to upload their files.  In either case, a perfect solution is Microsoft SharePoint, but to be honest, this isn’t very practical for personal use and the price point can be quite high.

For those of you that don’t know, SharePoint is a site that allows you to upload various documents according to a pre-determined file structure.  You can share these documents with team members, “check out” documents so only you can edit it, so on and so forth.  I realize I am not doing SharePoint justice here, but from a 30,000ft view, that is its primary use.

Now, wouldn’t it be great to get SharePoint for free?

Well, unfortunately you can’t (believe me I have looked). But you can get close!  In fact, you can get 7GB (yes… Gigabytes) of free storage with this free Microsoft SharePoint alternative: Microsoft SkyDrive. 

I was surprised when I stumbled across this tool as I have never really heard of it.  SkyDrive is really trying to carve out a piece of the free storage market (think “Google Docs”) but has run into some branding/marketing issues.  I find this a bit surprising since they offer more storage than most of the other options out there.  Plus, the user interface is just intuitive and you are backed by one of the most successful companies of all time!

If you need to store training materials (heck, even personal stuff like pictures), then I strongly suggest you sign up for a free SkyDrive account and give it a shot.  It’s about time to free up some of your diskspace anyhow right? 😉

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter