Is SharePoint the right choice?

My (software) company has hundreds of customers. We'd like to provide each customer with a SkyDrive-like application, something for sharing documents and files in general among their employees or their own customers. The application should be a SaaS one, hosted on my company's server farm.

We took a look to the way SharePoint manages documents, and it's more or less what we need; but we are a little scared by the weight and the complexity of SP (high hardware requirements, high competence required, and we haven't talked about licenses yet!).

Moreover, a consultant told us that choosing SharePoint we should create an instance of SP for each customer (one database for each).

So, the question is: can SP be the right choice? Which simpler and easier solutions can help us to reach the goal? Should we build it by ourselves from scratch?

Update: I forgot 开发者_高级运维to mention that we're looking for an asp.net solution and, in case of third-part applications, we should be able to customize the code.

I would not use SharePoint in your case, mainly for these reasons:

• There is a licencing cost. You are using only a small part or SharePoint. So the price you are paying for the functionality you are using is high.
• Scaling SharePoint to many users requires a lot of competence, since you do not have any other SP installation this will be expensive.

My experience with Sharepoint has confirmed what you fear, that the product is far to big for its own sake. It's at least 3 enterprise products rolled into one. I would not go that way unless you need more of the features it provides.

For (self-hosted) document sharing I would have a look at:

• Confluence - Wiki with a possibility to upload documents. Enterprise grade

If you can loosen your requirements to include cloud-hosted solutions there's more to choose from:

• Dropbox - Extremely flexible access to documents with great integration into your computers file-system. Each 100 Gb costs only $20 which should be cost-effective even for hundreds of customers.
• Google Documents - Similar to Dropbox, but with a web interface instead. Has branding so you can use it on your own domain, and conversion of office documents so you don't have to download them to change them.

Hope you find something that fits your needs!

I agree SharePoint is a much bigger enterprise application.

However, you can go with WSS v 3 or SharePoint foundation 2010 which is free with Windows Server line of products. You can also extend it with custom functionality using .NET code.