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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs SharePoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (10th)
SharePoint
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (1st), Web Content Management (3rd), Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (1st), Enterprise Intranet (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is designed for Content Collaboration Platforms and holds a mindshare of 8.8%, down 9.8% compared to last year.
SharePoint, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Content Management, holds 17.3% mindshare, down 20.8% since last year.
Content Collaboration Platforms
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi Hasankhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use but offers poor integrations with Oracle and has inflexible security configuration
I can't configure the current security I want. There are a lot of bots in it. Sharepoint doesn't integrate well with Oracle, and we use a lot of Oracle products at our company. Therefore, it makes more sense for us to go to Oracle instead of continuing to use Sharepoint.
Sanil Paul - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlined collaboration through seamless integration and customization
I have been an administrator for SharePoint and have used it as an end-user for document storage. Predominantly, I've been involved in administration SharePoint helps a lot since we've moved from using it directly to using it as a backend for Teams, which makes collaboration easier. It supports…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it doesn't require coding. You just need to configure it. You don't need to code before getting something running. It makes it very fast."
"The collaboration, the ability for multiple users to work on a single document."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Communication Site."
"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."
"The most valuable feature is that it is very usable. I can navigate it, I can have a media call, I can have a call with my project team, so we can chat with every team kind of like WhatsApp. Any time there are projects or other things, we can chat in a secure way. It's automation-specific secure."
"The solution is scalable. You can do both horizontal and vertical scaling."
"The solution's most valuable aspects are its collaboration capabilities, its communications site and the innovation within the product itself."
"The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it."
"There is not just one valuable feature; it is all of them working together."
"The product provides flexibility in collaboration."
"OneDrive and SharePoint provide a secure, fully auditable way of storing information."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The most valuable feature of SharePoint is its user interface, which is very easy to use."
"It offers ease of use, which is crucial."
"For any organization with more than one person in it, if they are trying to organize things to let people in the company know what others are doing, then this solution is good for them."
"It's stable. It's very widely used by companies. Also, the knowledge of the product has improved over the years, and by other companies that support it or are Microsoft SharePoint partners. So if there are problems, there's always a user or company that knows the information or can help you; even with very uncommon problems."
 

Cons

"It is a bit restrictive to develop in the cloud version. A lot of features are in the cloud now, and you have to develop on the outside. As far as the platform and the programming side of things are concerned, it is moving more towards configuration management rather than programming. When we are doing solutions, we are basically just configuring it to make solutions happen rather than actually using the Visual Studio code and developing from scratch in the cloud. It is almost like creating an app. You have created an app for your phone, but the app doesn't really sit on your phone. It sits somewhere on a server, and the database sits on another server. The app is just pulling and pushing information. The whole development has changed. We used to install things directly on the server and then run the application from the server. Now, it is more of a modular architecture."
"The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF."
"Workflows could be simplified."
"The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations."
"I think these tools do a pretty good job. There is only one area of improvement. Maybe Microsoft can invest a little bit more into the ease at which integration can be done with other third party applications."
"The permission management features need improvement."
"The product is behind in development and lacks some features."
"The user interface needs improvement because there is a lot of stuff in there. I use five to eight navigation buttons. It should be more user-friendly. Frequently used menu items should be arranged in a proper way. That would be helpful."
"When working on a website with SharePoint Online, not many people can edit simultaneously. If I am editing one section, my colleague cannot edit it at the same time."
"The product does not perform 100% when used outside of a Microsoft based browser, Chrome, Firefox, etc."
"There's a challenge with desktop applications synchronizing with online documents in real-time. If someone is working on a document in the desktop version of Excel, for example, and someone else is editing the same document online, the changes won't sync immediately. That's the only real challenge we've encountered."
"The solution should be made more user-friendly for technical and business people."
"SharePoint sometimes cannot handle the amount of co-editing that we do."
"Replication needs improvement."
"It should have more user-friendly customization, as it still requires developers to get engaged and build sites."
"SharePoint’s scalability could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost. With the on premise version, you pay for the license once. For the cloud version, there is a recurring fee. It is very expensive. They expect everyone to pay $20 or $30 per user per month."
"It can be expensive for on-premises deployments, especially when you have to support SQL Server as your backend database. That's where the cost comes into play. SQL Server has its own licensing, which Microsoft keeps on changing. Therefore, it can become costly. In the earlier versions of SharePoint, version 2007 or 2010, they had an express version where the SQL Server licensing was free. It wasn't like a full-blown SharePoint. It was only a slimmed-down version. It used to be whatever your hardware costs. You would install the free software and work with it, but you were very limited in what you could do in SharePoint. If you wanted the SharePoint Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, then you had to pay more to get the SQL Server license based on the number of users or servers. The subscription model is different for cloud deployments. Licensing is per user and per month. The cost also depends on the storage required. If you have a lot of sites or documents, then you need to expand it based on your needs."
"There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
"The cost is expensive, but worthwhile."
"The licensing model for SharePoint Online is based on per user, and it is monthly. The price of the solution overall is good."
"The pricing works for us."
"The pricing is competitive."
"As usual, Microsoft’s licensing structures don’t really seem to fit the needs of their products. This leads to always paying for a project you will never use fully or always be adding to."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"It is pretty reasonable. It is $5 per month per user. We have 12 users now, so it is about $60 per month."
"The data classification and search elements are cheap."
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Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Would Alfresco give an organization more benefits in terms of cost, features & security as compared to Sharepoint?
Alfresco scores are high on all features of an ECM solution and tools. Back office processing, rated as 3.36 good. Business Process Application 3.55 Good to excellent. Document Management 4.12...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SharePoint?
I am not involved in the licensing, but Microsoft offers bundled pricing for Office, SharePoint, and Exchange, making it cost-effective.
 

Also Known As

Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Del Monte Foods, Unicredit Leasing, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Nokia Czech Republic, Perkins Eastman, JLL, ICA, óxito Software, Dorset Software, PKP Cargo, Arcapita Bank B.S.C., AVE CZ, Chesapeake Energy
Toyota, Aeroports de Paris, ASBBank Ltd., Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals, CambridgeshireConstabulary, D&M Group, NPL Construction Company, and The Regional Municipality of Niagara.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. SharePoint and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
839,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.