SharePoint Reviews

Collaboration with other Microsoft products has made SharePoint a real tool for us. You can use a personal OneDrive storage to share your own documents with others, but also use SharePoint sites to manage projects with external users.

All attachments are put under SharePoint. So, no more of network sharing is required to store documents. Document versioning is also a useful feature for our organization.

No need to worry any more about emails with attachments and obsolete versions with those attachments. People can edit an online version at the same time. You don’t have to save and send anything anymore.

Though Office 365 Groups is only partly based on SharePoint Online, it gives a great option to share team information with inside and outside users.

SharePoint Online is excellent as is, but licensing for the on-premises version is expensive.

I have been using this product for eight years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. It is an excellent product if you don’t have to customize it too much.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support level 9/10.

I did not use any other solutions prior to SharePoint and I would not change to another product either.

Setup is very straightforward when you know the architecture.

I didn’t evaluate other products.

Keep it simple. Make use of this product without huge amounts of custom applications and scripting.

• 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.

Project management activities.

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

Libraries, lists, and reporting.

Better wiki offerings.

• Site templates
• Document management
• Permissions
• Publishing features

The solution has helped host our intranet and thereby helped in content publishing and distribution.

• WYSIWYG needs improvement.
• Performance and UI can improve.
• Mobile rendering is not up to the mark.

I have used this solution for over three years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We did not use a previous solution. We did upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

The multi-server farm setup was not straightforward.

Pricing and licensing is not as complex as some of the other MS suite products.

We evaluated Jive and Cisco.

Plan for global deployments using a distributed deployment topology.

• 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.

SharePoint is the ideal platform in the collaboration scenario where is quite easy to set up document repositories with appropriate permissions with just few mouse clicks.

In a publishing/internet scenario, it has a powerful publishing infrastructure that allows editors to publish contents with predefined layouts in a quick and easy way, with features like scheduled publish and unpublish, caching for page load performance and multilingual site support.

The search capabilities empower the company to create new kinds of applications that in the past used to be implemented with a web/database application and now can be realized using SharePoint lists and libraries as a backend.

It helped us particularly with document digitalization, both from a repository standpoint and from a project documentation sharing and co-authoring perspective, with great integration with the MS Office suite.

It also helped us manage simple processes that used to be carried out through email and now are centralized in a single spot.

It would be nice if the platform made it easier to implement a complete document management process (digitalization, OCR, protocols, etc.) without the need to integrate software from different vendors.

I’ve been using SharePoint for six years, including previous versions.

We have not really had stability issues, particularly in the 2013 version.

Once the guidelines and the hardware requirements are fulfilled, the performance result is in line with expectations. Beyond that, SharePoint 2013 has been created with scalability in mind, with all services deployable on an on-demand basis, independently, even on a dedicated machine. In addition, is pretty easy to scale services when you require more performance.

Fortunately, we did not encounter major issues, but support has been generally good.

I did not use a previous solution.

We used a consultancy company to set up the environment and everything has been deployed within the estimated time frame. The seamless integration with Active Directory made it easy to provide access to all company users.

Pricing is in line with other enterprise products. For a small company, the cloud version might be more suitable from a licensing cost standpoint. Bigger companies should take a decision based on the size of the IT department and the number of users involved, which can make an on-premises solution more convenient.

We thought about an open source solution, but the features and the support provided wasn’t sufficient to satisfy our organization’s needs.

Like other products similar to this, it is very important to pay attention to employee’s training regarding the use of the platform. They should be prepared for the change. Otherwise, they would be tempted to reject it without evaluating properly the advantages.