Suite, best of breed or in-house development

In this blog I want to write about the pros and cons when choosing between suite, best of breed or in-house development when setting up the infrastructure of a developer shop. I will reason why we chose best of breed and the argumentation that lead to this conclusion.This blog will contain most references an examples to products on the Microsoft .NET platform, but the content was written to be read by anyone including non-developers. 

So what are the differences between the three alternatives. 

Alternatives

• A Suite can be thought of as a collection of applications from a specific vendor. It doesn't have to be a commercial alternative and DotNetNuke is one example of a suite where all the major components are delivered in a single box (wiki, forum, blogs, cms, etc).
• Best of breed are standalone applications that work isolated and doesn't rely on being part of different ecosystems. For these systems to be efficient they should provide a mechanism to be integrated with other systems. An example of a good best-of-breed system is YetAnotherForum which only focuses on delivering a good forum solution
  
• In-House Development is building the stuff you need yourself. Skilled developers can rapidly build the desired functionality on an on-going basis and usually you build what you need as you go. 

"Personally I've experience with all three of the approaches and there are clear benefits and downsides to all of them. " More...