SharePoint Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Manager of Operations at a hospitality company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 23, 2017

The document repository features are a distinguishing point compared to a file server.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve been using SharePoint for nine years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Documentum.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user274608

European Business Architect - B2B Marketing & Sales with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 12, 2016

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Cross-site search finds knowledge in the organization. Direct document editing facilitates collaboration.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

There is much more collaboration and sharing across SharePoint.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, we used enQuira to store questions.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is affordable for what you get.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user269952

President and Founder with 51-200 employees

Jul 19, 2015

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Integration with Outlook could be more stable, but MS Dynamics integration is a key feature.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Occasional Office365 SharePoint outages have been noted.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Use enterprise pricing as a part of Office 365.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options were evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Microsoft partners

James Lewis

PCV Engineering & Bus Driving Recruitment Consultant at Likewise Consulting

Oct 16, 2018

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Helps with document collaboration and workflow

Pros and Cons

"Helps with document collaboration and workflow."

"Needs improvement on the user interface."

What is our primary use case?

Enterprise collaboration.

How has it helped my organization?

Helps with document collaboration and workflow.

Provides us with a records center.

What is most valuable?

Records center

Shared calendar.

What needs improvement?

Ease of use.

Improvement on the user interface (UI).

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user220764

IT Business Analyst for Sales Enablement with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 20, 2017

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I like the way we can create the views of documents and create column metadata. The mobile experience is wanting.

What is most valuable?

Document management and permissions: For the document management functionality, I really like the way that we can create the views of documents and very easily create column metadata.
The flexibility of document sets and being able to manage access with permissions
The permissions functionality is outstanding. There is the ability to have group or individual permissions. The complete granularity of being able to apply permissions at collection, site, library, list, folder, and doc set levels give ultimate flexibility.

How has it helped my organization?

It has completely replaced our Intranet and provides a great central storage area that is far more accessible than traditional shared folders on file and print servers.

What needs improvement?

As we are still on an older version, it is difficult to answer this. Primarily, the mobile experience is wanting in SharePoint 2010.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used SharePoint for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We did not have any stability problems.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We did not have any scalability problems.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Our previous system was shared folders and file and print servers.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I was not involved in the decision.

What other advice do I have?

Office 365 and SharePoint online is the way moving forward. Integrating it with Yammer and Office 365 groups provides a much greater feature set than SharePoint alone.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're enterprise partners.

it_user500811

SI with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 16, 2017

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Provides faster search results and better document search. Data portability between Excel reporting and Power BI allows us to create beautiful company reports.

What is most valuable?

SharePoint Search. The combination of a central search portal and search-based navigation (search based on predefined metadata) returns faster search results.

SharePoint business intelligence. The data portability between SharePoint Excel reporting and Power BI allows power users to quickly create beautiful company reports.

Hybrid in SharePoint 2016

How has it helped my organization?

SharePoint Search improved document searchability from different sources like file systems and Office 365.

SharePoint Reporting and PowerPivot make it much easier to create a company report portal.

The SharePoint 2016 on-premises version, Office 365 and ADFS integration allow a good intranet/extranet architecture scenario.

What needs improvement?

The workflow engine. MS Workflow Manager is still in Version 1.0 and the future Microsoft strategy for this product is unclear.

Requirement dependencies of the initial setup and support could be very complex.

Companies often decide to buy workflow products such as K2 or Nintex because of larger features set and better stability.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using SharePoint for five months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were issues with a cumulative update for SharePoint.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The new MinRole feature does not support a small environment. It will be solved with new Feature Pack 1 this year.

How are customer service and technical support?

I rate technical support 3.5/5.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Our intranet portal was based on in-house development. We moved from legacy to a standard product.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup using the graphical wizard is very easy, but the recommendation is to use PowerShell scripts. Ready to use scripts like AutoSPInstaller make it much easier.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

In SharePoint Hybrid Mode, Office 365 User SLs can be used to access your licensed servers deployed on third party shared servers/datacenters via License Mobility using Software Assurance. Check this possibility for saving money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Alfresco and Liferay Portal.

What other advice do I have?

Take time to plan your portal information architecture before installation and train your users and create a content editorial group.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We have a gold partnership with Microsoft.

it_user8925

Developer with 51-200 employees

Sep 8, 2013

Comparing the Social Business Platforms: Sharepoint, Jive and Drupal Commons

If you were expecting me to have a real change of heart since my last review 4 years ago, you are probably going to be disappointed. This is the least favorite option of the 3 products I am reviewing in this roundup. I will do my best to explain why.

1. Cost

The great news is that now with Sharepoint you have some really nice pricing options. One of my original gripes with Sharepoint was that it was extremely costly. You had a lot of upfront costs + per user costs + hardware costs + expensive Desktop software costs (Visual Studio, etc.).

While many of those costs still exist for the server version, Microsoft recently added Sharepoint Online which has a much simpler pricing system. I actually reviewed both the Sharepoint Online $3 user/mo plan and the server edition on Rackspace which offers a free trial. I will detail some of those differences as we review this product.

The enterprise server edition is still pretty pricey even if you use Rackspace. Using Rackspace is a way to cut down on your company’s IT costs since you will be outsourcing some of the difficult IT infrastructure to Rackspace. That being said you would still likely have some of the same licensing costs even if you use Rackspace or another hosting provider.

SP online offers $3/mo per user costs with no minimums and they also have a $7/mo option (with a few more features) as well. Crunching the numbers for a small 30 person company you’re paying $90/mo and for a 100 person company you are paying $300/mo. This to me seems a lot more reasonable as pricing goes compared with Jive.

2. Ability to Customize

This is where your Sharepoint version matters. With the online product you have the ability to change the look and feel of the site and add apps to the site including apps from the app store (which offer free and paid apps).

Customizing the theme

Adding apps to a site

Furthermore, a big customization aspect is the ability to add multiple site collections and subsites (which has been a strong selling point for years). You can create public sites, private sites and sites that are subsites of others. You can imagine how this is appealing to large businesses with many departments. And remember you can do all of this now online without all of the expensive hardware, IT support, etc. that used to be required to run Sharepoint.

With the server edition you have much more flexibility to customize Sharepoint. Sharepoint runs on ASP.NET. If you have ASP.NET developers on staff, you have the ability to create features using ASP.NET and deploy them to the server. This has also been a big selling point for Sharepoint.

I was very critical of this aspect of Sharepoint in my original blog because as I found then, SP was much more difficult to customized (via development) than what was advertised. Even with several expert ASP.NET develoers and a windows server admin on staff we had difficulty doing simple development tasks. Numerous SP defenders responded to my original post saying these issues have been fixed over time. I no longer have Visual Studio and I no longer work on Sharepoint sites so I can’t comment on these improvements. I can say that for organizations that have ASP.NET developers, the server edition will certainly be an advantage. For businesses that don’t have Microsoft-developers, now they have an online edition only version which will likely be a better fit.

3. Overall features

As I started playing around with Sharepoint 2013 I also read some reviews to compare my experience. A quick Google search provided favorable reviews that are worth mentioning:

After reading these reviews, I discovered what I experienced and what I read were significantly different. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on. And I have built an entire Sharepoint site. I have created and deployed SP features. I have read Sharepoint books and I am familiar with the Sharepoint vernacular. I still had a difficult time figuring out how to navigate Sharepoint.

Sample site administrative homepage

To be fair, with a large platform like Sharepoint there is going to be a learning curve, especially for administrators. TechRadar puts it this way:

It takes time to figure out everything you can do, and to get the most out of it you need to get everyone to put their documents and thoughts and analyses into SharePoint sites.

So that for me is the first issue I have with Sharepoint. It just does not seem user-friendly to me. My feeling is that many of these blog reviews compare Sharepoint with itself, as opposed to comparing Sharepoint with competing products. If you strictly compare Sharepoint with prior versions you could argue that SP has improved in all aspects. But SP is no longer the only enterprise-level offering. In that light, it’s really more of a fair comparison to evaluate SP against other products with similar features.

Here is an example. I see an app for “Custom List”. This is a feature familiar to SP users but maybe not quite as clear to non-SP users. So I add the Custom List app to my site. I am not 100% what it’s for but I take the plunge and add the Custom List.

Screen grab of the “Custom List” content area.

I start adding items only to come to the conclusion, “Now What?”.

After adding a few items

This feels a little bit like Drupal taxonomy but I am not 100% certain. I vaguely remember using it somewhat like taxonomy when I worked on my last SP site, some 4 years ago.

When I click on the options area my hunch is that there are some awesome things I could do if I only knew how. And so maybe a good Sharepoint book would help me out right?

Click on menu options for an item

But then that’s the issue isn’t it? As the TechRadar reviewer mentioned that a social intranet like this is only useful if everyone is interacting with it. And SP in my opinion is just too difficult to entice everyone in an organization to use it.

Learning curve aside, one of the big selling points for Microsoft is it’s integration with other Microsoft products. Now I should mention that Jive (and probably others) also have some Microsoft integration. I did find with the online version of had some Office integration that the server edition did not (maybe because I was using a barebones version perhaps)? I found this to be a pleasant experience.

Adding a SP document

Adding a Microsoft Word doc

Office 365 is Microsoft’s online suite of products meant to compete with the very popular Google Apps suite. At Mediacurrent we use Google Apps and love it! I have looked at Office 365 and my impression is that there’s no compelling reason for companies to pay the added cost unless they have already been in the Microsoft ecosystem / upgrade cycle for many years. That being said, for a full blow-by-blow comparison check out this recent comparison from PCWorld: “Office showdown: Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps.”

Conclusion

My conclusion is that Sharepoint is better in it’s current form but not significantly better than the competition. I would not be able to recommend this product to anyone who is not already entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem. What I mean is that for companies who use Microsoft products for years, run Windows servers, and who perhaps who have even used past versions of Sharepoint, I would certainly think that those organizations would be more comfortable with this product. I am sure I will get feedback from such people who will tell me that I am overly critical of Sharepoint. I just want to reiterate that companies that have ASP.NET developers and run Windows servers, for that audience Sharepoint is probably your best bet. For other organizations I am pretty sure it wouldn’t be the best fit.

To me the best feature of Sharepoint is the ability to create multiple site collections and multiple subsites, with permission inheritance. And you can have it all plug into Active Directory. This is really how you can harness the power of Sharepoint. I also think that Sharepoint is much more suited for intranet sites and public sites. That being said, there is certainly an advantage to using one system for all.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Alfonso Alvarez

CIO at GDELS

Mar 12, 2019

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Creation of communities is very straightforward, but the user experience is very poor

What is our primary use case?

It is used to support Intranet. It has good content handling and MS Office integration, but poor user experience.

How has it helped my organization?

It has allowed documentation control and distribution through the organization, managed easily from the AD.

What is most valuable?

The lists handling is perfect, and any kind of content linked to them very easy to publish.
Creation of communities is very straightforward.

What needs improvement?

The user experience is very poor. Configuration for new aspect means usually buying add-ons or a very high level of customization.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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Updated: January 2025

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Product Categories

Enterprise Content Management Web Content Management Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) Enterprise Intranet

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