SharePoint Reviews

• User permissions and document libraries
• Basic CMS capabilities with user-based permissions
• Ability to tie into other products to extend and scale the platform

We use SharePoint largely as an internal intranet; users are organized through AD and into their respective teams. Each team is responsible for their own websites and areas (including document repositories). Through this form of user organization, we can share resources with one another and in other areas, we can also set up public access so that everybody has access to everything.

On top of that, we can set up applications such as Power BI and web parts to handle data processing, telemetry/analytics, and even document processing. We have web forms that collect all manner of data, with workflows, to help with internal processes.

• Ease of use
• Out-of-the-box experience
• Learning curve

For the most part, the tool is useable, but there are many end users who still find it difficult overall. As a developer, I am able to find my way through the interfaces with time, but it takes too much time to learn these things and remember where they are. As an end user, I can understand why some people altogether give up in frustration.

I have used it for 10 years, through various versions.

I have not encountered any stability issues. SharePoint is a very stable platform, provided that it's installed on an equally stable server environment.

Occasionally, we come across strange server-level errors, but they are few and far between. Normal users almost never have problems, except for permission-based incidents.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. SharePoint is very scalable, provided that you have the resources to ensure its smooth operation.

For example, enabling Power BI is almost as easy as subscribing to the SaaS and flicking a switch. Similarly, other third-party vendor plugins are as easy as installing them and making the webpages and web parts available to the users. However, making sure that the platform itself is configured correctly and deploying the plugins correctly, is often where some things can fail. SharePoint itself scales well, it's just ensuring that all the additional resources are working cohesively.

N/A. I am not a system admin for our SharePoint instances, so I don't contact MS support for SharePoint issues.

To my knowledge, we have always used SharePoint. We have not switched away from SharePoint because of its AD integration; it makes automatic permissions that much easier.

N/A. I am not a system admin for SharePoint and was not involved in the deployment.

While a business owner of the platform, I can only comment on that the upgrade/migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 was relatively smooth, albeit very slow.

The migration process took an entire weekend, and our instance is shy of 150GB total stored contents.

Pricing and licensing is a very subjective topic. Some companies have more resources than others, and some vendors are more flexible than others.

• Always find a solution that fits your needs the most; worry about the money later.
• Always make sure that this is a solution that your company can use and take care of; don't buy the latest and greatest tools because it's the hottest product in the market.

We are an academic institution, and so we have a EDU partnership for volume licensing and other enterprise purchasing agreements.

For this particular product (MS SharePoint), we are using the SharePoint Enterprise CAL license, for our on-premise solution. There are other departments that do the same thing with enterprise CAL, but our overarching relationship with Microsoft is through our central department.

N/A. This was a pre-existing solution that's been upgraded many times since its first roll out (2003 > 2007 > 2010 > 2013).

Make sure that you have the proper resources to ensure that the product is well maintained. This includes both technical resources and if necessary a governance group.

There is a steep learning curve for those not familiar with the way Microsoft works. They have a specific, albeit predictable, way of doing things. Ensure that your developers and system administrators are familiar with this "way". It seems arrogant and militant to state, but if your resources aren't willing to do things the Microsoft way, they should be taken off this project, else they will slow things down or outright make things worse.

The product itself is very robust and capable, but the success of the tool is largely dependent upon the team that deploys and maintains the product, as well as resources available to it.

Without proper resources, the product can flounder and fail.

We have taken advantage of the list features extensively and the ability to clone subsites.

The creation of lists and the ability to tie lists together is valuable. This has made my job and other different department’s jobs easier. We have many different lists defined on our server. We can use one of the list items on another list so that we have data integrity. That way everyone spells IBM the same, etc.

The ability to make templates of sites means thatt they can be easily recreated over and over.

An example of how we use the lists is what we call our parking portal. We have a list of pin numbers that parking has given to us to use in our underground parking lot. We have several different departments that use these numbers and they get charged when they use them. We have a separate list for reservations that we tie to the pin numbers. This is used to make sure that:

• The pins are only used once.
• The appropriate department gets charged for the parking pin used.

It does too many things and some of them seem impossible to set up.

One of the features that I could not get set up was the access interface. It had many steps and I just couldn’t get it to work. It should be easier to build access applications to do some of the things we want to get done.

We have used Microsoft SharePoint since 2007. We have upgraded to 2010 and then to 2013.

I have run into problems with Microsoft updates killing my test machine for two months...

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is 5 out of 10; it is complex and must all work.

We didn't have anything that did this before.

Initial setup was complex. You needed to understand the parts before you could set up the whole, and you needed to understand what parts you needed to get going.

Pricing seems fine. Licensing seems straightforward.

Nothing else did this at the time we started up.

Start out in the cloud and see if that will get you where you want to go.

This version is a lot easier to use than the predecessors but it is still not easy to setup and get running. I love the new features and look forward to working with Microsoft SharePoint O365 online.

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.

Collaboration.

Single window information sharing.

Workflow.

It should have a lighter interface.

• Document and data management
• Information sharing across the organization
• Collaboration
• Knowledge management

• Improved transparency around work products.
• Ease of access to documents.
• Increased employee collaboration across our organization.

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.

SharePoint designer workflows can be buggy sometimes without any apparent reason. Also, customization can be somewhat burdensome.

Depending on the customer’s needs, one or more features become more relevant and important. If I were to generalize and extract the most common features that the customers have used, I would say:

• Web\document content management
• Integration with the Office suite
• Collaboration over the content, sites, BI, search, and workflows
• One or two-way integration with other enterprise applications

I see the strength of SharePoint working as an extendable framework/platform for customers of various sizes, on premise as well as on the cloud, but not as an independent niche product/solution around a specific feature.

Our Intranet is built using SocialXtend, a SharePoint based product.

It has transformed the way we do our daily tasks and the way the departments collaborate over projects, opportunities, and other operational activities.

Knowledge sharing and access to information has been highly simplified.

Almost all of the areas of the product have room for improvement; some more than others.

• At a high level, mobile, custom development/testing frameworks, BCS, external services integration, and BI may need to catch up more as compared to the other feature sets.
• SharePoint is a combination of multiple products working together. It has come a long way, and the improvements are being pushed at a much faster pace than they used to be earlier. This fail-fast approach of adding features quickly instead of a longer release cycle is a much better way to develop a product in my opinion.

I have been using SharePoint since 2001 in multiple capacities, such as a solution host, or as a full-fledged enterprise solution for on premise, as well as on the cloud.

My personal observation is that if the implementations are done in the right way by following the recommended best practices and guidelines, the product works just fine.

To be clear, I am referring to all the underlying products (IIS, SQL Server) as well as to the O/S.

There have been genuine issues. However, we have used SharePoint and CU to address them.

We have not had scalability issues in SharePoint 2010 and onwards.

Technical support is good.

We used solutions from the Java world. Those, as well as this one, are based on the customers' needs.

For simple farms, things are pretty straightforward. But for complex farms, I have not yet had that experience.

To be fair, it’s not SharePoint all the time. It’s a combination of other environmental factors and third-party products as well.