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Should you build your SharePoint intranet, buy a platform or extend SharePoint?
Buying guides usually set in-house development against a purchased platform and overlook a third path: keeping SharePoint, already paid for in your licenses, and extending it with a ready-to-use solution installed in your Microsoft 365 tenant. The real question is who will carry the pace of change of Microsoft 365 for the next five years, and at what cost. Technical debt is not a marginal issue: organizations spend on average 30% of their IT budgets managing it (Protiviti, 2023).
This white paper gives you three tools to measure that cost and that risk before any request for proposals: a five-year technical debt model, a decision grid of fifteen criteria weighted by persona and twelve questions to put to an integrator and a vendor alike.
What's inside:
- Three options, not two: build, buy and extend compared on eight dimensions, from who carries version upgrades to where documents live and how reversible each option is.
- A platform that changes without asking you: what Microsoft's lifecycle policy requires, and a timeline of the 2025-2026 changes that affected custom SharePoint intranets, including the retirements of 2 April 2026.
- Seven sources of technical debt: from upgrades of the Microsoft development model to value not created, each with an audit question to run against the quote on the table.
- The five-year cost model: seven lines, written assumptions and an illustrative scenario you can recalculate with your own rates, along with a method to price value not created.
- The fifteen-criteria decision grid: weights from 1 to 3 for the CIO, the digital workplace lead and the CFO, with a four-step method to use it in a workshop.
- Twelve questions for the integrator and the vendor alike: for each question, what a good answer looks like and which answer should be treated as a warning sign.
- A ten-point exit plan and a 90-day roadmap: what to write down before signing, whatever the option, and how to reach a decision in three thirty-day blocks.
Why download it:
Three options compared on equal terms. The white paper does not simply oppose custom development and a purchased platform: it adds the extension of SharePoint and applies the same criteria to all three.
Maintenance priced, not ignored. In the illustrative scenario, the initial build represents only about a third of the five-year cost, and the model shows you how to check this with your own assumptions.
Questions that also apply to your own team. The twelve questions and the exit plan are designed for an integrator, a vendor and an in-house team alike, with written answers to append to the contract.
A decision prepared with finance. The grid and the costing are built to be discussed between IT, internal communications, HR and the finance department, in three option columns.
