SharePoint Reviews

For intranet and file sharing and internal communications.

Yes, especially reducing the print paper and having a very quick response, and reducing the time between department and people.

Sharing and workflow.

Special implementation and development should be easy.

Stability is OK.

Scalability is OK.

Partner was not good. They did not have so much experience.

FileNet and Documentum.

Very hard.

Vendor and partner.

I did not measure, but it is useful.

Pricing is very high.

No.

No.

To initially set up as part of a records management initiative. The company I was working for needed to better track and support how and where documents are located. 

While there were plenty of out-of-the-box solutions for records management projects, this probably under-utilized aspect of SharePoint can help better track documents and retention. 

Ease of implementation. Certainly, IT needs to give appropriate access to a sandbox, but learning is easy and quick.

Microsoft seems to always be making changes. Sometimes you will get a message saying some aspect of what they deliver is being discontinued and often you simply never had time to explore what it had to offer in the first place. 

I use this solution for storing documents. It is a single sign-on with the identity system and so it will sign me on and I will upload, download some document, and share it with my colleagues at work.

It has helped us with storing all the documents, which means that people are not going to intervene. There is a way of extracting knowledge within documentation and tracking it. There are knowledge assets for where documentation is stored, indexed, and searchable through SharePoint. I think this represents the collective knowledge, which is highly valuable.

Search can be improved a lot because we are always trying to compare it with Google Search. Beyond that, it would be helpful to tag the documents.

It is stable.

I was not personally involved with the setup. My IT team did this.

When I am choosing a product, I think of the quality of service, economy of sale, licensing, implementation, the skill set of documentation, SaaS availability, and skill set. These are the constellations in mind when I'm choosing a product.

I think SharePoint can definitely look at taking it to the next level of customer experience. It's not about how jazzy it looks and so on but it's more of how intuitive it is and how it can basically enable a user-friendly experience. When downloading a document, ask yourself how can you enable it? How can you enable some kind of a decision tree, and how can you have some kind of a bot in there which can do some assistance for the customer who was supposedly struggling to find the document, or is not able to find what to search. The bot can intervene and help the user with some alternate keywords and to clearly define what the user is looking for. Those kinds of things should be the next addition to SharePoint.

It's good but we are not using a lot of load in the system.

It's the look and feel and maybe the integration with the Office platform.

Basically, it's just for internet and communication. It's not a busy implementation.

We need the storage of the files, the documents right now are in the database. Maybe SharePoint has to improve the capability to store the information in file systems. In theory right now, it could do that. But, I understand that some functions are lost when you store the information in a file system, so maybe that's a way SharePoint can improve.

It is very stable. But, I think it depends on the infrastructure. 

It's scalable because you can add more and more SharePoint's installations and maybe you can divide the content and everything, so it's scalable.

We have not yet had a need to contact tech support.

Used as a site for staff to add records. It is integrated with RecordPoint in the back-end, so the staff did not have to work within an EDRMS.

SharePoint enabled the staff to share documents and work on a document simultaneously. Our staff found it simpler, as they did not have to work within a classification system (it was all done in the background).

Sharing of information is much easier within an organisation and staff training is reduced because learning basic SharePoint is not as complicated as an EDRMS.

Integration with Outlook would be a major improvement. Staff also commented that it does not integrate despite being part of the Microsoft family.

Digitizing the document flow, storage, exchange and backups along with integration of Epicor. Also, it provided a direct interface with third-parties.

• Moved from papers to digital. 
• Removed the need of paper storage and people flow into the office.

Document flows, storage, and numbering take off the actions for checking and assigning the numbering and running around with approvals and pre-approvals. 

• Improve the user-friendliness.
• Make it more intuitive.
• Make it more like a flow/BPM view style.
• More hints and make it more user-customizable.

• Mostly the documentation management features.
• Managing information such as events and announcements, document libraries, picture libraries, using calendars, lists and custom lists.
• Sharing files, document storage and retrieval, the check-in and check-out functionality, version history, custom properties, customized views, customizable workflows.
• Collaborative team sites for sharing and managing information.
• Search features, including advanced content processing, managed metadata, and continuous crawls.
• Security features, including permissions and document/page/site control.

We are now able to organize and control our documentation easily. Versioning, check in, check out and setting permissions for pages and sites enable us to manage our document and picture libraries without a fuss. We can now easily find documents within sites and pages, as long as documents are named and tagged appropriately. We can now create more complex workflows using SharePoint Designer, which is easy to use. However some improvements to SharePoint's workflow functionality could prove useful.

Approved and updated templates and documentation are now available on SharePoint. This ensures consistency and standardization across the organization. Documents and templates are centralized in this one repository, and only selected individuals are permitted to edit documents within the organization’s main documentation library.

There is transparency to the organization; whereas, previously there was none. Knowledge sharing and collaboration is more prevalent; therefore, communication has increased. We use the SharePoint home page to make company announcements, such as employee birthdays, anniversaries ,and upcoming events. We have also recently started using SharePoint to automate some of our manual processes.

SharePoint Designer enables creating workflows easily. However, they produce errors at times. There seems to be glitches which require workarounds to sort out. It is an amazing feature to have because workflows can fully automate processes that would otherwise be manual.

SharePoint Foundation was found to be adequate to our prior business needs and has been used company-wide for the last two years. However, due to its limitations in features, a decision was recently made to move away from Foundation to either Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.

We have not experienced any serious issues regarding stability, except for the minor glitches with workflows. As previously mentioned, we are still on the Foundation version. However, I believe if SharePoint has been properly set up on a stable server, using proper governance and a strong infrastructure, we should not experience major issues with stability.

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues. SharePoint 2013 is reportedly scalable. As long as the solution has been properly configured, our organization should not experience any foreseeable issues.

We have not engaged with technical support from Microsoft at this time. We deal directly with in-house technical support. We will definitely be using external technical support from Microsoft when moving over to the Standard or Enterprise Edition.

We were previously using a network drive that we accessed directly from our laptops and desktops. There was simply no control of information and documentation; and loss of information occurred. There were inadequate, non-existent, or deep folder structures, messy content structures, and a lack of document management and control. Versioning was done manually. Important documentation with sensitive information was being stored on local drives. Updated templates and documentation were not being used.

There was a fair amount of research, investigation and infrastructure planning involved prior to its implementation and setup. SharePoint was a new initiative that was attempted by our in-house team. Initial setup was not so straightforward. It was a bit complex, as it is with most new products; but we did eventually get it up and running.

Our technical team is now up-to-speed, and the current process moves smoothly. With that said, it is useful to have prior technical knowledge and experience in SharePoint in order to facilitate a smooth setup and integration process.

Pricing and licensing options are structured according to the size of the organization. Good business leaders make the best decisions and choose the best fit for their organizations based not only on its business needs, resources and budgets; but also based on what people at their organization need and will use. Make sure that all areas of the organization buy-into it. Don't invest in a solution that you have not properly investigated first. Weigh out all your options first.

The SharePoint project had already been initiated before I joined the organization. However, since we are only on Foundation, the organization has embarked on a comparison between SharePoint and Confluence. After proper investigation and research, it was decided that both solutions were useful in their own right. Confluence is a collaborative working tool; and SharePoint offered a documentation management solution.

SharePoint and Confluence integrate well with each other. Confluence also connects with SharePoint. The business leaders and decision makers of our organization decided to test the SharePoint solution using Foundation 2013. Based on user feedback and interaction with SharePoint Foundation, they have recently decided to go with the Enterprise version.

I advise organizations or business leaders to fully investigate and research SharePoint, as well as all the features that are available for each edition. Based on your business needs, it might or might not be the right fit for your company. Properly weigh out your options and make the right decision for your organization, based on what your organization’s needs; how people work; or ideally should work.

Indecisiveness from a management and leadership perspective on what tool to use reflects poorly on the rest of the organization. Therefore, people feel discouraged.

SharePoint is a great document management tool. It works for me and fits the specific needs of my job. However, while it works for me, it is not being used in the same way by the rest of the organization, or sometimes not at all. There must be buy-in. It is best to survey whether people in your organization find this tool useful, and help them understand how it could best be used. It is also in the best interests of the organization to consult with a SharePoint Expert before, while, and after implementing SharePoint. Many organizations implement the best tools without helping their people realize the full potential of their use. Therefore, people become wary of new technology. They don't welcome the change and fail to engage with the new product.