SharePoint Reviews

We have a customized solution called TeamCenter. The technology behind it is SharePoint.

The use case is to distribute project mandates among team members, track and collaborate on the work that has been done. It creates the work breakdown, and assigns tasks, manages the workflow accordingly. We are able to check what is being done, who is been handling it, and where the workflow is at right now. It eases control, messaging, and provides a common view where we are at.

Now that this system has been put in place, we have email integration and a lot of work which we were doing manually is now done by Teamcentral, thanks to SharePoint, thanks to Microsoft.

The workflow feature is valuable because it enables us to cascade responsibilities. It cyclically keeps tabs on work and to what extent it has progressed, where it is stuck. That feature is really very helpful.

There is always room for improvement. Workflow is something that can become more intelligent. I can't say to what extent intelligence can added, but I think there is always a scope for making it more intelligent.

It's going to last until Microsoft revokes the license on which it is built.

Since scale is not challenging me right now, I haven't really paid attention to its scalability. We have 12 users on it. Their roles are primarily deployment, resource management, and fulfilling the technical mandates people are working on.

We did not have a previous solution, other than mail-messaging and Excel.

The initial setup was straightforward for sure. I didn't see any complexity in it. The implementation took about three-and-a-half months.

We used a consultant. He was technical enough to use the plug-ins and integrators that were required. He was a specialist.

The pricing works for us.

Workflow is helpful in the allocation of tasks in any close-knit teams, teams which are not sized beyond 20 to 25 at the most. If the workflow can be made more intelligent, adding value to the information rather than just pinging and cascading and shooting of alerts, that can really help with value-add and to save time.

There was one techy who designed and implemented this. Currently he continues looking at what is required, but in terms of continued support I don't have any staff on it. When any fixes are required, he handles them remotely. We don't have anyone on staff to manage it.

We expect the scale to go up and more business to pour in so we expect the number of users is going to increase. We would definitely be looking at a little more intelligent implementation of workflows so that we've got better control and better delegation of mandates.

I would rate it at seven out of ten. It works for me. I haven't seen anything parallel.

• Enterprise content management: It is one of the biggest features of SharePoint, which includes the use of enterprise columns for keyword searching and content organization.
• Collaboration tool: It provides seamless integration with other Microsoft Office tools like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
• Enterprise search
• Other vital features are check in, check out and in-built approval workflows for documents/lists.

SharePoint provides enterprise content management, which includes the enterprise document management tools. Also collaboration tools such as workspaces and team sites improve the productivity and increase collaboration. My Site provides rich personalization features.

• SharePoint should provide more out-of-box templates. They should add more site templates like blog templates, forum templates, and so on.
• They should stabilize the platform more.
• Document management requires some performance tweaks as well.

I have used this solution for about four to five years.

When used with large data, SharePoint may produce performance degradation; that requires some optimization and tweaks.

Scalability is great, but again huge data will be a little cumbersome to manage.

The technical support is good.

We have always used the SharePoint content management system.

For document management, we use IBM FileNet, which is great for managing document but poor with collaboration tools.

The initial setup is not that complex, if the architecture is laid down properly.

There are multiple licensing options available. You should select the one that is suitable to your needs.

We evaluated some other products, like Telerik CMS.

Plan yourself properly in terms of the architecture. If you plan early for proper architecture, you will have a long-term solution.

It has a lot of flexibility to store various document and lists. There are integrated workflows and it helps to improve the end user's ability to be more efficient.

Automating the basic approval processes is an easy win. You are no longer required to do the work in emails, but instead using the email as a conduit, you can facilitate the work in the work flow.

The rock solid central document storage makes it very easy for all business departments to have a standard location for their documents.

The user interface should improve. It is still a bit clunky for the new user to navigate around.

I have used this product for three years as an administrator and twelve years as an end user.

For the enterprise environment, I did not encounter any stability issues.

There were no scalability issues as such. However, the 500 items limit in views can be limiting in some instances.

I would rate the technical support a 7/10, i.e., by using the internal support teams with various level of knowledge.

We were not using any other solution previously.

For a medium to large scale business, it is excellent.

For a small business, there may be too much overhead costs and a steep learning curve for the solution to be adding any value.

When properly configured and understood, SharePoint can be an extremely valuable company portal for all manner of office-related functions, including document management, file sharing with versioning, forms, workflows, etc. The platform is also capable of custom applications with database connectors.

Currently, it is used as the default website for Intranet. Sites are available for each department. News and announcements are available on the main page, as well as the company directory. A custom HR portal has also been developed to be the method for onboarding and offboarding employees.

It is not very intuitive to most users. It can be customized, but it requires a SME with a great deal of experience and training.

I would like to see Microsoft build better site templates to help kick start those new to the SharePoint environment. Better documentation, training, and tutorials would also help as well.

I have been using SharePoint for over ten years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is average.

I’ve not used any other tools.

It’s now available as a part of Office 365, but a local, on-premises install has some advantages if keeping everything inside your Intranet is important.

Find out how others are using it. Examine good examples of custom applications and workflows. Consider using commercial add-ons as well.

When properly implemented and users are adequately trained, SharePoint can take the place of network file shares for most types of use cases. Instead of users never knowing where to find documents, or which document is the current version, SharePoint makes it easy to share documents and set permissions. A classic workflow that SharePoint handles easily is the review and edit of a document by multiple individuals. By using a workflow, each person that needs to review and edit one or more documents is notified by email, can edit the document (and depending on your release and configuration, multiple users can edit at the same time), and mark their workflow task as done. There is none of the confusion of emailing a group of people a copy of a document, getting all their edits back with a different copy for each person. With workflows, each person edits the same document and the initiator of the workflow knows when each person completes their review/edit. Later releases of SharePoint extend this functionality to the cloud, adding file synchronization for mobile devices.

Out of the box, SharePoint is not known for intuitiveness, and administrators and users alike tend to have a difficult time creating effective and usable sites. However, with some time and effort, and good training, it can be a very valuable tool and centralized location for a company or department. One very useful type of SharePoint site that can be created is a “Meeting Space”, where regular/recurring meetings are held. Agendas for each meeting can be setup, along with tasks assigned to each member, as well as a document library for documents related to each meeting. Project management sites are another useful tool for managing collaborations and project tracking, with optional integration with Microsoft Project.

Easy management of content and portal and the document repository features are a distinguishing point compared to a file server.

We use a document library with custom attributes and simple approval workflow. Some program enhancements with .NET enables the Quality Control department to distribute files to an extranet portal after senior Quality Control staff approval. Thousands of documents have been distributed in this way in the past years. This approval flow replaces ordinary emails with much clearer tracking of the workflow process.

Notification templates should be editable without coding. Also, summary notifications should be customizable too.

I’ve been using SharePoint for nine years.

When the number of documents in a library grows too high, there will be performance issues. There is no easy way to archive files uploaded to SharePoint unless you have extra budget to get 3rd party solutions like AvePoint.

Scalability is not a problem as long as you can virtualize the SharePoint server farm. Hardware speed acceleration could overcome the software limitation. In my case, one front-end server served 700 users.

Technical support is done by our vendor, not directly from Microsoft. My vendor was good on supporting SharePoint.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup wizard helps you with the install. It is straightforward and easy.

Pricing on the server itself is acceptable, but CAL licenses could be an issue if you are not an Enterprise Agreement subscriber, or you are opening SharePoint 2007 to external users. With the new license model on SharePoint online, the issue here is not applicable.

We evaluated Documentum.

I don't think anybody nowadays should deploy SharePoint 2007. However, the SharePoint online that comes with Office 365 is worth a look. But beware of sizing as the fee is charged by data size and processing resources that would affect your SharePoint online response time.

The cross-site search is great for finding knowledge stored or used somewhere in the organization. Most documents are created in MS Office. Each MS Office Document can be stored directly on SharePoint. The threshold for people sharing their documents online has gone down. The cross-site search enables browsing all that knowledge with ease.

The ability to edit MS documents directly from SharePoint makes it easy to collaborate on documents with other people.

The strength of Microsoft has never been in its OS, but in its MS Office suite. MS Office 365 in combination with SharePoint, as a total collaboration tool, brings collaboration to another level.

There is much more collaboration and sharing across SharePoint.

Google Docs has two abilities that SharePoint should support as well:

• The ability to work in the same document at the same time would be a huge improvement. During my MBA studies, we used Google Docs for this. Unfortunately Google Docs doesn’t convert well to MS Word to add the finishing touches.
• Just like Google spreadsheets within Google Docs, I would like to be able to fill an Excel spreadsheet through a form posted on SharePoint. SharePoint has list views that can do something similar, but I want it to do more, tightly integrated with Excel. This would improve the document collaboration options for spreadsheets.

I have been using it for three years.

We had issues with stability when we implemented it at a previous company. We had issues where the system was down for a while.

We did have issues with scalability. Performance isn’t so good if too many people use it.

At a previous company, Sonepar, we were supported by VX company, and at my current organization, Canon Europe, by Capgemini.

Previously, we used enQuira to store questions.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It is affordable for what you get.

At Sonepar, we considered using open source CMS systems, like Drupal and DotNetNuke.

Ensure the search is quick enough. If not, look at the indexing configuration.

• Office integration
• Collaboration
• Discussions
• Shared documents
• MS Dynamics integration
• Tasks
• Schedule project integration
• Subscriptions

It's allowed automatic distribution of technical updates to shop floor technicians in the FABs.

• Cloud and Office 365 integration with Outlook could be more stable, and an external company collaborator’s connections can be iffy.
• Custom site provisioning and management
• Migration from On-Premise to the Cloud has no automation tools to help in migrating the enterprise content, and so this requires throttling the bandwidth to guard against attack.
• New application models are too complex - in Office365 you are sharing the whole SP farm with all Microsoft customers in a region so fixes take too long.
• Deploying apps in some cases have limitations because you have no access to the admin console.

I've been using SharePoint since its initial release, including Office365, On-Line 2013, and On-Premise 2013. In total, it's been 15 years, and I was involved in the initial SharePoint Pilot test.

Getting customers to see it as the de facto repository for collaboration data takes serious investment in training and executive backing. Upgrades and migration are challenging.

Occasional Office365 SharePoint outages have been noted.

No issues encountered.

It's poor, and if you want Microsoft support on SharePoint you have to hire Microsoft Consulting Services.

It's poor, and if you want Microsoft support on SharePoint you have to hire Microsoft Consulting Services.

We used various methods to achieve the same results shared folders and third party document management solutions, e.g. Documentum.

It's complex because you must spend significant time determining roles and train accordingly, or else it becomes an unstructured dumping ground for everyone’s files.

I've done it both ways, and Microsoft Consulting Services is well equipped to properly implement SharePoint.

It's very high, I can't disclose exact figures, but it's a seven-figure number.

Use enterprise pricing as a part of Office 365.

No other options were evaluated.

Budget enough design and training dollars to seed your enterprise with certified electronic workers that can provide thought leadership, mentoring and set standards for use.

Enterprise collaboration.

• Helps with document collaboration and workflow.

• Provides us with a records center.

• Records center

• Shared calendar.
  

• Ease of use.

• Improvement on the user interface (UI).