SharePoint Reviews

The valuable features are its integration with:

• The Office 365 ecosystem
• Other Office 365 services
• The Office application suite

We haven't rolled out Sharepoint online to the entire organization. However, we have been using it on a small scale within our IT function.

It has brought on improvements due to:

• Ability to easily share documents which reduces the instances of documents being emailed around.
• Accessibility from mobile devices which complements the file sharing capability very well.

I would like to see improvements in the interface. There is a somewhat convoluted way to change lists, columns, and even the site landing page.

Being new to Sharepoint, it wasn't obvious how to do things and where one actually starts. The recent Microsoft interface improvements are good.

We have been using this solution for sixteen months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We are using a different on-premise platform. The plan is to migrate to Sharepoint online for our document management and business process applications.

We are switching in order to:

• Migrate to a cloud platform
• Maximize our investment in the Office 365 platform
• Consolidate platforms
• Provide a more accessible, standardized, and integrated platform for our users.

The initial configuration was straightforward. The online support documentation is well written and easy to follow.

First understand the scale of what this product offers.

Don't hesitate to engage with a partner to provide best practice advice if you don't have the in-house skills or knowledge.

Ensure you understand what governance and compliance requirements your organization has to which you need to align the platform.

Have a plan on how you are going to structure the site collections and hierarchy.

• Enhanced communications
• The ability to set up sites to share data/information in a one-stop shopping method. Including:

  
  

  • User-friendly interface to share files
  • Ability to have calendaring specific to the function/department addressed by the site
  • The important links facility, which provides easy access to frequently used items
  • Workflow, which allows us to define processes and make it easier for the user to perform a task. The workflow provides a consistent framework for performing the task, as well as providing behind-the-scenes flow, thus removing the manual process of determining where the flow goes next. This also removes the human error portion of that flow.

As the employees are spread around the country and the world, this allows us to communicate more effectively by providing an easier interface with the information (files, calendars, links and news) all in one spot. It allows us to collaborate more effectively as people can access this information according to their time availability. The one-stop shopping is critical, as everyone is looking at one version of the truth and therefore are on the same page.

This product has allowed us to coordinate the efforts of individual groups, as well as different groups that need to interact for specific projects/processes. Before this, there was a lot of emails being exchanged and certainly there were times that some of the people that needed to know where inadvertently left off of an email or two.

Not so much an improvement as a caveat: Due to the flexibility and power of the product, out of the box it can be daunting to use. Without some consulting work from a SharePoint expert, the product would not be quite as user friendly.

I have used it for two years.

At first, we encountered stability issues, but they have been ironed out and – knock on wood – we have been stable for a while. I believe our issue might have been related to sizing the resources properly, as we started small with the intention of growing as we developed more uses for the product.

At the end of the day, I would say we have not encountered any scalability issues. We have added more sites and continue to add them as people realize the power and effectiveness of the product. There are times, though relatively infrequent, where it seems to bog down a little but it does not have a major impact on productivity.

I believe most of our external support comes from a consultant and from a user point of view, I am satisfied as I have yet to have a question/issue that could not be resolved and I have not had many questions or issues.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Here again, from a user’s view, I would say initial setup was complex as to obtain the most benefit, you needed to understand what you were looking for and how best to fit it into the scheme of SharePoint. It seemed that there was often more than one way to solve the need and trying to map the need with the best approach took some time.

I am unable to comment as I am not involved with the details of this.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We chose SharePoint as we had business partners that were already using it, we had exposure to the product that way and liked what we saw.

Make sure you find the right consultant.

Make sure you invest the proper amount of time to plan the implementation. This is not something like Excel, where you can install, train and use. To get the most out of it, you need a game plan for what you will use it for and how to design/customize it to your needs.

The feature that it works on any device, any place and anywhere for everyone.

Microsoft Office 365 has provided us many ways to share documents across a diversity of platforms with a diversity of people (both inside and outside our company).

Synchronization of files in OneDrive can take some time which can ‘annoy’ some users.

At my current company we are using it one year, personally I’ve been using Microsoft Office 365 around 3 years

Since we came from a Small Business Server the Exchange migration is a minor point of attention. There is no mailbox by mailbox migration, but only a cut-over migration. Furthermore we had some issues with MacBook users and their Office settings. Also we encountered some issues with mail not arriving correctly. This was NOT caused by Microsoft Office 365. A support partner had hardcoded settings which were not communicated. Once we deleted these hardcoded settings, the problems were solved within one hour.

There are no issues with stability.

There are no issues with scalability.

Customer Service: The level of customer service could be better, but it all depends on the person in the other side.Technical Support: The level of technical support could be better, but it all depends on the person in the other side.

We had a Small Business Server environment which has a cap in the user environment. Since we grew out of the number of users, we had to change. Microsoft Office 365 was the fastest and most powerful way for both short and long term vision.

It was straightforward, since the migration wizard provided by Microsoft is a good wizard for the environment we have.

We did an in-house implementation.

No

Take a good look at what your customers wants and needs are before choosing any other product than what you’re currently using. This will make implementation and migration easier and also makes it easier for people to change to a new platform. With Microsoft Office 365 things changed radically in our environment, which had its effect on the day-to-day business, although none which couldn’t be resolved, but a good discovery and inventory before making choices is the better option.

Project management activities.

A central repository for artifacts, and planning for corporate projects.

Libraries, lists, and reporting.

Better wiki offerings.

More than five years.

Collaboration, DLP, and the search capability are some of the features I like the most.

It has improved our productivity to a great extent with its great collaboration features. Previously, business users were sharing documents through emails while different people contributed to the same document. This created a lot of confusion, such as:

• Issues with merging changes from some users
• No tracking of changes
• Version management

The business users had to spend a lot of time to get this to closure. SharePoint has helped a great deal in this space.

• UX
• Performance (especially Office 365): This is an issues when the sites are accessed from Asia/Australia, which is bad compared to accessing from the USA
• The mobile experience

I have worked with this platform/tool for more than eight years.

The current version is very stable compared to versions 2007 and 2010.

There are some performance issues with respect to the amount of data that has to be stored.

The technical support is very good.

I have seen customers using other tools and switching to SharePoint. Technology upgrades and feature upgrades are the key reasons for this.

The setup is complex, as you need to consider lots of things for the farm design.

The pricing is good. I have heard that MS gives very good deals on volume licensing.

It's a good tool, but be prepared to adapt to the new way of working with SharePoint and Office 365. They bring their own new features which are very good, but you will experience a learning curve.

Integration with Office 365 and Active Directory, and access from all our company users as part of the Office 365 licenses. Also, hassle free access from mobile devices to sites, forms, and lists, with powerful content search and preview.

We use it for all intensive document sharing business units and especially for document versioning control (quality control area in manufacturing). We also use the online forms (Infopath) to automate simple procedures in conjunction with Microsoft Flow..

The cloud-local file synchronization application (OneDrive for Business). It is not as simple as expected, but it works.

I have used SharePoint since 2013. From on-premise to the online version.

Sharepoint Online is a mature product.

We have had no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability, but you must buy additional storage if you use the given amount within your tenant (enterprise plans: 1 TB + .5 GB per subscribed user).

Customer Service:

The customer service is very good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is really good; fast responses and good resolutions within the standard included support.

We used SharePoint 2010 on premise. We switched due to the license cost and to give access to all our company users. Also, because SPO was included in the Office 365 plans. As a SaaS, it is always up to date.

Setup was not complex at all. We used third party tools to migrate productive sites and the new sites were created easily. The main difficulty is user adoption. It must be done with a lot of workshops.

We implement through a Microsoft Partner. The expertise was very high.

No ROI calculation, but today we have almost all of our procedures online - paperless office.

You can always make a good deal with Microsoft, especially shortly before the end of their fiscal year (July).

We did a business case and technical evaluation of Google Apps and Office 365. The winner was Office 365 due to user familiarity.

It is always good to start with a special need in a business unit and show quick wins to other units, as part of the adoption plan.

• Document management supports a wide range of capabilities including cross-folder views, custom views, group-by views, versioning, alerts, MS Office integration, workflows, and very flexible permissioning.
• Collaboration in general is quite capable, including calendars, tasks, custom lists, and the ability to easily view data from within MS Office, as well as the built-in apps support found in both cloud and on premises versions.
• Search is exceptionally powerful, supporting a range of hybrid on-premises and cloud configurations, with customizable display templates and refiners.
• The ability to leverage multi-level Taxonomy is useful for hierarchies, views, filters and navigation.
• The out-of-the-box Workflow capabilities are good, and easily extensible with excellent third-party applications.
• We found SharePoint makes an excellent framework for developing an intranet, with built-in support for multi-language versions that adapt to the user's preferred language.
• SharePoint has several excellent available APIs for extension, customization and integration with LOB applications.

By creating a platform for collaboration, it empowers users to collaborate and work together on documents, tasks and calendars.

PowerShell for Office 365 is exceptionally limited. The CmdLets available for SharePoint Online are focused on site provisioning and permissioning, and do not include CmdLets for managing Items, documents, libraries, folders, default metadata, tagging, and views.

Development can be a challenge, especially as the development model and direction promoted by Microsoft rapidly evolves, and product components get deprecated. The App model is necessarily restrictive in what it allows to be done, in order to maintain the stability in the multi-tenancy environment. This leads to moving to either client-side object model development, or splitting the application with some functionality done on dedicated servers outside the cloud-based SharePoint environment.

I have used this solution for 14 years

The early RTP versions can be buggy. There are always challenges with patches, but the product has improved over time.

The product is designed for scalability, except for the List View Threshold limitation.

Technical support is poor. Microsoft makes it tough to get quality support.

Initial setup is somewhat complex; it requires a professional for installation and configuration.

Cloud is the cheapest, but less flexible. The cost of the product is quite reasonable considering the feature set. The larger portion of the cost of the product is getting good professional help in shaping it to the organization's needs.

Before choosing this product, we explored alternatives such as Documentum from EMC (now spun off to OpenText), Slack, Box, Dropbox and even WordPress and Jive. However, for all-around capabilities that include not just document management, workflows, calendar, task management, blogging, calendars and overall business process management, we deemed SharePoint as the best overall.

WordPress for basic websites or Intranet is great, but there is no direct competitor for the full breadth of SharePoint. However, for narrow sets of functions, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Wedoist, Slack, and others offer competition.

Get a real professional to work with your team. Ensure training and collaborative working with users is included in your deployment plan. Adoption is key.