- 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.
IT Business Analyst for Sales Enablement with 1,001-5,000 employees
I like the way we can create the views of documents and create column metadata. The mobile experience is wanting.
What is most valuable?
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.
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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 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.

SI with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
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Developer with 51-200 employees
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:
- TechRadar.com: “SharePoint Online 2013 Review”
- InfoWorld: “SharePoint 2013: A low-key update you'll love”
- Ars Technica: "Review: Exchange and SharePoint 2013 ready for cloud—yours or Microsoft's"
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.
CIO at GDELS
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.
Increased employee collaboration across our organization
Pros and Cons
- "The ability to quickly and easily create team sites has been great."
- "It improved transparency around work products."
- "SharePoint designer workflows can be buggy sometimes without any apparent reason."
What is our primary use case?
- Document and data management
- Information sharing across the organization
- Collaboration
- Knowledge management
How has it helped my organization?
- Improved transparency around work products.
- Ease of access to documents.
- Increased employee collaboration across our organization.
What is most valuable?
The ability to easily upload and modify documents has been a huge help. In addition, the ability to quickly and easily create team sites has been great.
What needs improvement?
SharePoint designer workflows can be buggy sometimes without any apparent reason. Also, customization can be somewhat burdensome.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Consultant - Business Intelligence at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I especially value document sharing. I would like to see more freedom given to a power user.
What is most valuable?
I especially value document sharing.
How has it helped my organization?
The product has made document sharing with customers easier instead of emailing.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see the following:
- More freedom given to a power user
- Feature development on a site collection level without the need for farm-level rights
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used the product for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I encountered no stability issues.
What other advice do I have?
I don't think that this whole review is worth the effort as we are talking about a product (Sharepoint 2010) that is six years old, close to end of life, and not sold anymore. People who are new to this will certainly look for the latest version which I have no experience with.
We are mainly using the document sharing feature to share documents with customers in a secure way.
Actual development depends on server-side tools (Visual Studio running on the Sharepoint server itself), administrator access rights, and activities that cannot be done from machines. I guess this is by design, and probably is not going to be changed.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Director of Development with 501-1,000 employees
It has improved the exchange of knowledge from team to team. There should be an easy way to integrate images into the wiki through the drag and drop option.
What is most valuable?
The collaborative features, the central repository for project documents and the know-how for standard/best practices are valuable.
How has it helped my organization?
It has:
- Improved the exchange of knowledge from team to team.
- Provided better product support through the centralized documentation of procedures.
- Assisted in how-to to fix production issues.
What needs improvement?
The integration of Office document editing and publishing with the wiki component that we use for creating our how-to section needs to improve. At the very least there should be an easy way to integrate images into the wiki through the drag and drop option.
We also have many other tools that create their documentation in the form of HTML pages, sometimes with hundreds of pages. We should be able to directly integrate those into our site, not just through a link but to truly integrate this content as if it was native.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The only issue that we have is when we are creating a new site from templates. During such a situation, many of the sub-components do not work or have to be completely reconfigured once created. This makes the creation of a new project based on our project site template very painful.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There were no scalability issues but then again, we are only about 30 people who are using it constantly.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support level is practically nil.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not have anything before.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was not so complex but our attempt to migrate was plagued with some issue and it was ultimately abandoned. It was not worth redoing everything what was there .
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For us, in terms of the project development and support tools and for a collaborative repository of live documents, there is nothing like this solution.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate a few other options. I know we looked at Jostle which we did adopt for the social-side of our intranet and for the publishing of static articles.
What other advice do I have?
What is costly with SharePoint is the customization and maintenance of these custom components.
Unless you are a .NET development shop or are thinking about hiring a SharePoint person on staff full-time, you need to stay close to the out-of-the-box config.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Change Management Consultant at a analyst firm with self employed
I used it to build tactical solutions such as a document control management system for the Policy and Procedure Department and a case tracker for Legal Counsel.
What is most valuable?
- Libraries
- Lists
- The workflow module
How has it helped my organization?
It improved communication, collaboration and content/record sharing in the organizations I worked for. It helped us manage our documents and records effectively and at a reasonable cost. The TAT for process/document review, approval and publication cycles have significantly improved from maximum of three months for each document down to two weeks.
Everyone, from the board level down to the most junior staff, was able to utilize SharePoint for their own needs. I even used it to build a simple tactical solution to fulfill the needs of various units within the organization. Eventually, these solutions became instrumental in building strong business cases that convinced management to adopt fully fledged comprehensive solutions. Examples:
- - Routing of documents to be checked within Trade Finance.
- - Document control management system for the Policy and Procedure Department.
- - Case tracker for Legal Counsel.
- - Specialized workspaces for minutes of executive committees and business cases presented there.
- - Online approval workflow for executive committee.
- - Project tracker workspace.
- - ISO surveillance tracker.
- - Knowledge management center.
- - Etc.
What needs improvement?
- Workflow management module
- The web page editor
- The reporting tools
For how long have I used the solution?
I used SharePoint 2007/2013 for six years as the super administrator from the business side.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I definitely encounter stability issues, like all other Microsoft-related solutions.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not encountered any scalability issues. It’s highly robust, and can be scaled further as the organization’s requirements increase.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is bad, as the support is for all other Microsoft products.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was complex, but it was due to our experience and knowledge as an organization. Data deployment was a nightmare as the vendor (a Microsoft business partner) was not well prepared.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Don’t really know what to say here. I’d rather not answer. In general, we didn’t have any issues with SharePoint licensing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other products, but I don’t remember the names at this stage.
What other advice do I have?
Go through the vendor-selection process thoroughly. Dig all the information you can about them and try to meet other organizations who utilized them for implementing the solution.
I would give Microsoft SharePoint 2007 a lower rating. SharePoint is an excellent solution that is highly scalable. However, like all other Microsoft products, it has some frustrating bugs and other issues relating to customer experience. However, version 2013 showed significant improvement. The level of empowerment for the business administrator significantly improved as well. The solution is cost effective and licensing is highly flexible and straightforward.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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