SharePoint Reviews

The collaboration features of SharePoint 2013 are probably the best I have seen in an enterprise product out of the box. Along with the integration of Office and other enterprise solutions, this product cannot be beat in the market currently for what it brings to the table.

There are times you may want to alter how SharePoint works using custom code. This is very important as I have seen developers who are here one day and gone the next with bad code that was based on .NET, recreating what SharePoint does naturally, no acceptable documentation left behind to work from and will not accept calls accept for a fee.

So think before implementing customizations using code, you leave room for error in the code and a gaps in business processes that may need to be updated later. If the code is not using best practices for development on the SharePoint platform Microsoft updates to the server could also effect the successful implementation of these updates as well. If you can bare with using out-of-the-box tools this gives you a stable environment, where Microsoft updates these features and the foundation of the product for you.

There are third party solutions that would be a better fit for the platform that are tested and vetted by Microsoft for a price and maintenance fee. These are better suited for a SharePoint platform than custom code because you know what you are getting and you have someone to call on when things go wrong. I am not saying these are going to fit your every need but most of the time they do help get you a lot closer then where you are out-of-the-box.

The use of the document management features such as versioning, check in and check out, search, managed metadata and other out-of-the-box features help you organize and manage documents easily. Finding documents and being able to track documents wherever they are in your site makes this tool easy to use and cuts down on an employee’s time looking for documents, using email to manage documents and knowing they have the right version of the document because it’s in a centralized location.

There are training aspects in using the tool effectively, but do not take long to grasp and understand. Workflow is also improved in this version of SharePoint. Workflow lets you create a business solution using the combination of functionality within lists and workflow actions to create a business process that flows through an easy or more complex process. SharePoint Designer 2013 allows you to create these flows within the tool once the SharePoint farm is configured to host the integration of the tool.

From my experience, it’s not the product needing improvement, but the way organizations deploy the enterprise solution. When 2007 SharePoint came around, there was no documentation and information given by Microsoft on their website. You were on your own, basically, looking at blogs and relying on others' failures. Now, there is no excuse to have a badly configured SharePoint farm and or using best practices to make sure your configuration is solid.

There are organizations who deploy this solution enterprise-wide with no training for users or administrative IT support, which is also a big area that needs improvement. Although SharePoint is fairly easy to use, you still want to get total buy-in on the product, so training helps bridge the gap to get that buy-in to use the product going forward. It also helps to show how users can make the most of the solutions and services SharePoint has to offer. Coming up with a couple of how-to demonstrations and even a site with some bells and whistles the users can play with always helps with getting support of the new solutions and services.

Organizations are also not providing governance as to how the user community will use the solution within the organization. Governance is the most important aspect of getting the solution configured for your organizations use. Providing rules for everyone who plans to use the services of SharePoint 2013 is the key to success. Also, bringing representatives from all departments as stakeholders into a working group to meet, vote and share information about what they would like to do with the new tools is also key. You can avoid duplicate efforts for development and other pitfalls that may fall outside of your governance plan by including other departments. This way, your new SharePoint farm does not get the wild, wild west treatment where everyone is doing their own thing.

After working and supporting over 100 companies, I can honestly say only two companies had governance documents in place at their organization, with working stakeholder groups to support the solutions and services. Remember, governance helps with looking at restricted and accepted practices within the solutions and services provided by, in this case, SharePoint 2013. It's just like going to the Office 365 site and looking at exactly what I can and cannot do within the cloud offering, which could be based on data sizing and other parameters I might be looking for to support my organization.

The governance document is used for on-premise implementations, so you can design, install and configure your internal farm based on those configuration parameters laid out in your governance documentation. After you get the governance rules in place, you then create a design document that will capture all configurations within the farm. This will layout how the SharePoint farm should be configured based on SQL, SharePoint, backup, restore, DR and any other third-party tools and configurations.

The next document would then be your installation guide, which is based off of the design document. This shows how all the components mentioned in the design document will be installed and configured based on the design document's configuration parameters. This is just a quick summary of what needs to be done before you do anything with installation of software. Following best practices and other Microsoft documentation for all these documents and the installation of the software is the key to success with this enterprise solution.

I have used this version for 3 1/2 years (15 years overall with SharePoint).

In some very rare cases, you might see that Windows updates can interrupt your service, but Microsoft is very quick to fix the issue. Other than that, it’s the users’ empowerment that is in play in this environment overall. You are providing a platform that empowers the users of the product to manage themselves. For example, instead of a call to the help desk, you have what are known as site collection administrators and owners. These power users manage the security of the site. So, instead of having a call to the help desk, the group’s power user can manage these calls themselves, which takes a load off of the help desk. This is one of many examples.

SharePoint 2013 is very scalable. The problem is IT departments that don't understand the solution start in the wrong direction, which can lead to reinstalls and other interruptions because of the initial configuration. Again, following best practices and building a good solid foundation is how you avoid complications later with growth and other scalability issues.

Microsoft has great support for this product, as well as the SharePoint user community, where there are sites with information you can search from any search engine. Microsoft also has technical support pages that give you insights to installation, configuration and troubleshooting the product. You can also call 24/7 and get support from technicians from all aspects the product uses, such as SQL Server, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, PowerPivot and other integrations. There are also many third-party solutions out there to help with all aspects of the product from functionality, usability, 508 compliance, BLOB storage, backup and recovery, and a host of other areas in this version of the software.

I was a FileNet administrator but switched to SharePoint because of the integration of the Office products. I know that FileNet is a great product as well, but Microsoft has done a great job of integrating SharePoint with the Office suite. This drove my decision to move to SharePoint as a support engineer.

The initial setup as explained is complex. You need to understand what you’re doing as an IT engineer and also where this product will be in five years, as far as it being part of your enterprise. If you set up the wrong version of the product or the wrong version of SQL Server, you will not get the features you might be looking for. It’s best to see how the product will be used by your organization, and the bells and whistles your management is looking for to solve issues within your company.

When choosing a platform, just be aware there are choices. The choice you make in the beginning can make or break your installation and your goals for your organization. Think clearly and meet with other departments. Don't let IT do it alone. You want the buy-in and input from all parts of your organization.

In choosing options for services we looked at eRoom. eRoom’s interface was primitive and did not provide the functionality we were looking for and integration with Office. It also was not easy to use and it was not easy to empower users to create sites and manage their own security easily. I also believe that the training would have been more in depth with this product, as with Microsoft they have a way of making interfaces similar so you know where to look to find information and menus.

Find a certified person or company that can help you get started. This might cost a little up front, but your return on investment will be great. Do not go it alone. Again, the initial implementation is everything to the foundation of the product working for you. The version of software you choose can also determine what services you can make use of and can save you money.

• Enterprise Content Management.
• eServices Platform for developing applications on top off it.
• Organization Portals.
• Collaboration, Team working and sharing.
• Document Management.
• Simple workflows.
• Enterprise Search.

• Team sites and collaboration.
• Main entry point for all applications.
• Utilizing as a sign-on.

• Workflows.
• Performance.
• Content Migration and sharing.
• Reporting.
• User experience and design response.

I’ve used and implemented this software since the 2007 version until now (almost 9 years). My last implementation was in 2014, but I’m still using this as an end user.

We did have stability issues in the old versions and there were too many hotfixes, in the 2013 version. It’s more stable now, but it can still be better.

I've never encountered any scalability issues. In the past, I’ve implemented it in with 3TB of information, without any problems.

Technical support was very good, very responsive and professional.

We used to employ Oracle UCM, but we replaced it because of the features provided in SharePoint along with the customizations, flexibility and ease of creating websites, workflows, pages and applications.

Initial setup was straightforward, easy and successful.

SharePoint is a suite of features and products within one product. Purchasing and implementing it needs optimal usage planning. I would recommend that you select the pricing or license type based on your usage. (In general, the internet license is the best).

We evaluated multiple alternatives including:

• Oracle UCM
• EMC Documentum
• FileNet IBM
• Alfresco
• Liferay

Based on two selection exercises in two organizations; SharePoint was the best fit solution. The 2nd was EMC Documentum, then Oracle followed by FileNet and Alfresco, with Liveray last.

Plan, Plan and Plan again! Usage planning is needed with up to 70% of your efforts being expended in information gathering and implementation and usage planning.

In general, I find SharePoint to be a very useful tool when it's configured to allow end users a certain amount of flexibility. (In one of my previous assignments, all options were completely locked down. In that kind of configuration, the usefulness of the tool is highly dependent upon whoever configured the product. In this case, they weren't particularly good.) The latest versions of SharePoint are highly useful for configuring pages for managing and conveying large amounts of information, while giving users the ability to pinpoint the specific things they need with speed and accuracy.

Libraries and lists have a feature set that enables capturing large amounts of information and organizing that information in ways that enable multiple audiences/roles to use it effectively.

In my previous job, I built a site to support the PMO. It consisted of a top level site that gave a view of all projects undertaken by the organization and then individual project sites that were used to manage issues, risks, changes, action items, key milestones.

The top level site also contained links out to our scheduling software (SmartSheets). The individual project sites were based on a site template, making it very easy to instantiate a new one whenever a new project was introduced. All project information was contained within a single site collection and allowed both broad and deep searches and visibility of key project metrics.

I think that the current version of the product is actually quite good, but it's not always easy to find solid training and reference information, especially from Microsoft. Typically, third parties have better offerings than Microsoft, but it still requires a bit of searching to find the most relevant and easily absorbed material.

I have used Sharepoint in various forms since around 2003.

Over the last three years (three jobs as well), I've used SharePoint 2007, 2010, and 2013.

I have not encountered stability issues with either the on-premise or cloud hosted versions of the product.

I was never involved in planning for scalability, and have never been aware of any scalability issues in any of the places where I've used the product.

I generally avoid using Microsoft or Microsoft partner support where possible. Unless you are paying for their top-level consultants (which is frightfully expensive), you're often better off just looking things up on the internet and bookmarking the most helpful sites. In situations where support is being provided by internal staff, the results have been variable.

There's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of. You can use wiki's of various sorts and cobble together any number of open source or paid solutions that address a component of what SharePoint does. But that approach doesn't have the current product's level of integration and the maturity of its feature set.

I don't know about setup. It was never my responsibility. Since the products were in place when I arrived, I don't know who the vendors were that partnered with Microsoft to configure and deploy the product.

It's Microsoft; empty your pockets. Seriously, if you obtain SharePoint under one of their blanket licensing agreements you really need to pay attention to the terms and conditions, especially if your acquisition is part of Office 365. It's typically not very easy to drop licenses for a particular subcomponent under such agreements if you find that you're not using that particular piece.

This wasn't my choice. However, there's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of.

Know what you want it for first. Talk to other businesses using the product to understand their experiences. If it looks like SharePoint can bring real business value, then find the best implementation partner that you can find. I don't know the economic ramifications of cloud vs. on-premise, but I found the cloud version of the product takes a lot of headaches out of your hands with Microsoft being responsible to administer and maintain the back end.

Finally, be very wary of proposals from within your company to build all manner of applications, web sites, and data marts with the tool. Although SharePoint is capable of a lot of things, it may be better to purchase a purpose built product rather than rolling your own.

In the same vein, it is still important to have standards and enforce them within the organization, especially on how sites are structured if they are to be used by people in various roles and departments across the enterprise. Someone has to have a vision for the architecture of your SharePoint installation and use in order to assure you get full value. If folks get to do anything they want, you'll have a crazy quilt of unrelated data, applications, and web pages.

Lists, documents, wiki pages and being able to create sites/subsites are valuable features.

The fact that our operational process improvement initiatives continue to be assigned on a lower priority in our portfolio management, it has given rise to the use of SharePoint as a platform to run its day-to-day operational processes. Specifically, we moved away from using MS OneNote.

It has its limitations. We are unable to use this tool to "archive" data and run queries to generate hindsight information.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I did experience some scalability issues; this could be more because of trying to use SharePoint as a BI tool, which it is not designed for.

As it is internal, there is some knowledge that they are unaware of which makes it necessary for me to go check with third party sites (such as wikis) for answers.

Initially, we were MS OneNote.

All I did was request for a site to be created and then the rest of the configuration was up to me.

I am not involved with the purchasing decisions.

There are some features that I am looking for and that I am unable to find, for example creating nested IF functions.

I mostly use the solution for the creation and sharing of documents.

SharePoint is easy to collaborate with.

The solution's support services and GenAI could be improved and made faster and more knowledgeable.

I have been using SharePoint for more than two years.

I rate the solution’s stability eight and a half out of ten.

SharePoint is a scalable solution.

I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward and doesn't take much time.

Our IT team deploys the solution.

The solution has good integration capabilities. SharePoint supports remote work and team collaboration within our company. The solution's workflow data analysis and AI-driven content organization are good. I would recommend the solution to other users because of its reliability and AI features. SharePoint has helped our organization save time and money.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

SharePoint allows us to access and to search for what we have in our repositories.

What I like about SharePoint is that they keep up with a lot of updates, and they bring out new features. I also like that the system is integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of apps.

Document management and the ability to easily integrate single sign-on (SSO) are areas for improvement in SharePoint.

Integrating SharePoint with other software is what I'd like to see in its next release.

I've used SharePoint in the last 12 months. We use it internally in our organization.

The stability of SharePoint needs improvement, because once you start to get a large amount of data, it becomes very unwieldy, and it takes a long time to index. There are much better products for content management and knowledge management, when compared to SharePoint.

SharePoint is not as scalable, particularly when implementing larger projects. It's good for small-scale implementation.

I haven't personally contacted the technical support for SharePoint. It's our support team who contacts them.

I used HPE Content Manager, formerly TRIM software, which used to be owned by TRIM here in Australia. We used TRIM a lot, then it was bought out by HPE, HPE has now been bought out by Microsoft.

Our organization chose SharePoint because they wanted to become accredited with Microsoft. They saw that Microsoft was the industry leader, so everyone wanted Microsoft. They saw Microsoft as the way forward, at the time.

The initial setup for SharePoint was complex. Anything from Microsoft is complex.

We implemented SharePoint in-house. We had a team that had experience with SharePoint when we decided to use it as our content management system. We had the skills from implementation and from attending numerous Microsoft training courses.

SharePoint is probably cheaper than dedicated, larger, and more useful content management systems, so you could get a return on investment from it, as long as you keep your infrastructure and everything up to date, and move to the new version when you have to.

You have to pay for a license to use SharePoint, and any extended support from Microsoft is expensive. For example: if you have SharePoint 2013 and it reaches its end of life and goes out of support, you can migrate to SharePoint online, and that's a benefit, but you'll have to pay for extended support.

I evaluated Lotus Notes and HPE Content Manager.

In terms of what features I found valuable in SharePoint, I haven't found many. I had come from IBM and was very entrenched with Lotus Notes and the Lotus Notes environment. I love Lotus Notes. When IBM sold Lotus, we started to move away from Notes, and I didn't like it, and then I was made redundant. Now I've been outside of IBM, having to use Microsoft, and I hate it.

My advice to people looking into using SharePoint for the first time is for them to 
look at how much data they have, and also look at the volume their data and data holdings are going to grow to. They should look at how long it would take to get to that point, then look at their ROI, and whether they would need to upgrade to another product in the near future. I'd say "Yes. Go for it.", but they should also look at the future, and how it would be long term.

I'm rating SharePoint a seven. Yes, it's good for organizations to start on knowledge management, but you'd have to look at how quickly you think your data will grow, and how soon it would take to get to that point, because it can become unwieldy.

Our company is a consulting partner of Microsoft. We're a service integrator that works in both the private and Australian Federal Government sectors.

I have been using SharePoint for over twelve years. 

It's a big solution comprising many services similar to an active directory installation with connections to Skype, Exchange services, metadata services and stuff like that, it can do basically everything you need in order to deliver something like a Twitter website or similar solutions. So I do not think that anything rivals SharePoint on the market. Maybe if a lot of effort is placed upon some WebLogic solutions, this may happen. But, this would need a lot of customizing.

So if you want to have something like a business, or if you want to have something like a product catalog and you are selling something like Amazon, you want to uniquely identify your product like Amazon does it with its ASIM numbers and these to be identified with a name. So the service identifying these unique ASIM in numbers with their names which might be localized in English, German, Dutch or other languages. These are being identified by a managed Metadata service. Amazon does something very similar to Metadata and SharePoint. So, that's the basic technology everyone needs for this web service experience and order to identify the same object with different names.

The metadata services, the WCF service integration and the Voxel feature are three most valuable elements of this solution. The Voxel feature, for obvious reasons, because you want to implement business processes and you do not want them to stop if the machine stops so they have to be automatically started. This is What the Voxel feature in SharePoint does. The managed Metadata allows you to define your own notions or terms denoting notions within your companies. And I if I want to disarm them, or disarm power supplies of different types, I need something to denote the names pointing to entities, any program can identify.

Perceptively it does what people used to do with the pens and pencils, on paper. For Millennials, by taking a note of what to do on the paper or stone or whatever they have been using and let anyone else read it and execute with it. So what any back flow or business process you have did legal one for King Nebuchadnezzar 2,700 years ago or for any business where you are taking a phone call, we two are doing right now and writing down something or I have to remind myself to do whatever and sent that over to pop and be while having receipts from department A and have to digitally sign it and send out the paper. It streamlines everything for us.

All of this business processes, people have been performing solely within their minds. Maybe automatized with the structural feature, but it depends on all the metadata that has been stored within the managed metadata, service, user profile data or whatever. So you can not just say, "Oh, I want to send a car" to whom do you want to send it to. Which car do you want to send? So, all of these parameters have to be stored somewhere else. This is what drives the business process and SharePoint solution allowing you to automatize them.

I would be liking to see the talk features included in SharePoint because Microsoft effectively discontinued this talk and put something like logic apps but only for Azure, and most German companies do not like Windows Azure because they do not want to put that data into a cloud where everyone can see it. So, there's a lot of distrust with Azure environments and you need something to have on premises as a similar solution. And this talk is something like a big playing ground. For instance, if you want to play monopoly and anyone wants to move the pieces but moving the pieces on street A to street B means you are changing your business process from, I have been starting tax declaration, to I've been finding it but not yet sending it out. So, if you wanted to have something like a business process be denoted as a board game, which is what Monopoly did in 1945, effectively.

It is very stable if you know what you are doing and make some precautions. Microsoft lists these precautions, but these precautions are not automatized. It would be nice to have precautions such as: disk size, backup checks, or whatever automized that can be integrated with the SCCM team foundations server.

Well, that's one of the strengths because it not just using soap web services where it sends some XML file to different machines, but it's using WCF, which is a version of a web service, web services being used if you have a different machine where you want to call a function. The type of machines we are using now are invented by Alan Turing, a guy from the hacking Enigma code and Robert Dennard, who invented RAM. These types of machines do not allow you to, all functions on the remote machine. If you want to do that, you have to send a hint which is what web services does.

I have been using the commercial technical support and they're always professional. It's not cheap, but they are always professional. So if there's problems to be solved, Microsoft tops off as excellent.

The initial setup was very complex. We had to keep in mind all of the backup solutions. It is kind of like remodeling a kitchen. You must think of all of the parts, the architecture, the electricity, the air flow, etc.

I think that SharePoint is the best on the market in terms of stability, quality and capability. I also suggest that if a company has chosen SharePoint, the company must have at least a two day training prior to implementation.

The cost is expensive, but worthwhile.