SharePoint Reviews

When an organization is using Microsoft products already, the integration with the Microsoft Office products and the ability to leverage web-based Office products can transform business processes. I think there is a great benefit in integrating collaboration, e-mail, document management, workflow, and content management in one product. When I have been in the role of Information Architect, I took advantage of site content, metadata, advanced searches (FAST), web parts and the free applications.

There are a large number of solid third-party vendors that develop web apps that are easy to integrate and configure.

In smaller organizations or organizations with limited budgets, I was able to leverage SharePoint to provide a lot of functionality around workflows, content and document management with very limited customized development.

When implemented correctly, SharePoint and Office 365 can provide knowledge workers with the information they need quickly and it can provide for team collaboration. I have used it to transform relationships between business units and to break down silos.

I would focus on improving:

• Integration with other enterprise products.
• Simpler API.
• Enhanced ability to report against structured and unstructured data in the environment.
• More flexible security or training: I have noticed in organizations I joined that they lock down SharePoint so much, there is very limited functionality. As a result, teams in the same organization move to other collaboration tools when they would not need to.
• Enhanced ability for users to back up and restore at various levels of the architecture.
• Have SharePoint and Office 365 expand so that additional third-party products for document management are not necessary.

I have used it for over 10 years.

Any issues regarding stability are generally caused by a lack of governance from planning of the underlying infrastructure through ongoing operations. With best practices in rolling out any application from an infrastructure planning and operations perspective, stability is not a significant issue.

Frankly, I would make a case for many organizations to go with the SaaS-based option. I investigated the security around Office 365 in the past and it was HIPAA and PSI compliant. When organizations host these types of solutions instead of leveraging commodity hardware and expertise in a SAAS environment, that is where the issues of stability and scalability come up.

Technical support is excellent.

I have used Google and still do today. It is less expensive as a personal solution to document management, archiving and collaboration. It also integrates with my personal Google e-mail solution.

Rolling out the enterprise version and ensuring integration with other products, budgeting for the hardware, and ensuring governance was not easy for SharePoint. However, I did leverage all of the plans and checklists that Microsoft provided, which made the process much simpler.

Office 365 was very simple to setup and I liked the ease of expanding storage when needed.

It really depends on the size of the organization. For small organizations, I would advise them on just purchasing Office 365 for what they need in the next year or two. They can always scale up. In larger organizations, I would love to have the enterprise version. However, not every organization can afford the cost.

I compared it against Google's solution.

I would advise others looking into implementing this product to consider Office 365 as a SaaS solution. I would also provide a governance plan and some common templates and training to get them started.

I would advise them to start with the teams that will leverage the product.

I would recommend finding ways to combine business process re-engineering with rolling out sites. This would be an easy win: combining process improvement with content management, document management, workflow and collaboration.

I would tell them to expect some amount of customization depending on what they wanted to leverage the product for.

As a portal, EDM platform for organizations, I think it is an excellent product. The limitations I have seen are the implementation and expectations of the technology, not the technology itself.

It has an easy to distribute administration capability, and can also scale to meet a large number of future needs. It also has the ability to produce very simple web application development products, freeing up my team’s development activities for more advanced needs.

We mainly use this product for our intranet and capital projects team. It has allowed each business unit the ability to “own” their portion of the intranet, and allowed our capital projects team the ability to effectively manage projects that require a multitude records request requirements and archival tasks. It is very customizable, and it possesses a very logical architecture.

As usual, Microsoft’s licensing structures don’t really seem to fit the needs of their products. This leads to always paying for a project you will never use fully or always be adding to. Also, the product does not perform 100% when used outside of a Microsoft based browser, Chrome, Firefox, etc. It’s getting better, but the architecture is still behind. This is largely the case for mobile as well.

We have used this solution for almost nine years.

The stability of the system is fine, so long as you have a well prepared support team for your Windows offerings.

Scalability is one of the great strengths of the product, in that it scales very well. As an added benefit, due to the ease of administration, a lead in a business unit can take over such responsibilities.

The level of technical support from Microsoft is very little to poor.

We did not have a similar solution in place. Our intranet was previously an added product to our hosted CMS. And for Capital Projects, we were using a mixture of standalone Microsoft Project install and file shares.

After getting the infrastructure setup and deployed, installing and rolling out the product was fairly straightforward. A little bit of planning was required to better understand the differences in Web Applications from Site Collections, but that was largely straightforward.

Really take your time in planning the needs you are trying to meet. The licensing is very difficult to get right, and not as easy as many other alternative. Add in about a 15% cost to the initial cost estimates. You will find yourself needing to add something.

We did a brief overview of the market, and found that 9 years ago, SharePoint was a viable solution. Since then, we’ve settled on using it in very narrow cases, and fill the majority of our needs with custom development.

Invest a lot of time and energy in the planning for your needs. You will find that infrastructure needs are imperative to map out in the finest detail. Otherwise, your system will be continually under-performing. Also, pay special attention to the CAL needs.

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.

The most valuable features to our organization are the ability to store and share documents across the entire corporation, and the ability to use workflows. Our organization has multiple locations and even multiple companies that need to share information both intra-company and within the corporation. The ability to create workflows that can assign tasks and route documents for review and approval allows for documentation automation and project management.

We used to use project folders to manage new product development. With SharePoint, it allowed us to store all of the related documentation in a single project folder. Another example would be when we have a product quality issue, a single form is filled out and routed to the various people in the organization for review and resolution to ensure the issue does not repeat itself. Several locations use the calendar feature to schedule PTO and at one plant, they use the calendars to schedule the dock doors for freight delivery and shipping.

The user profile synchronization feature is cumbersome to configure and at least initially had some stability issues. Since then, it has improved in stability, but is still not a straightforward installation.

We have used SharePoint in our organization for 10 years, beginning in late 2006 with SharePoint 2007.

There have been no stability issues other than with user profile synchronization. The only times we have had SharePoint offline in the last 10 years were when we had a server issue in 2010 and when we have taken it offline for maintenance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but our installation only supports a few thousand people.

I have little experience contacting Microsoft technical support in relation to SharePoint, as we have not experienced any issues that would require their intervention.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup can be daunting if you are not familiar with the product, especially if you are setting this up in a multiple-server environment, which would be the common scenario. There are three main servers in the configuration: the database server, the web application server and the web front end server. In larger installations, that number can grow, as you can have multiple front end servers and multiple servers handling the various application services.

As with any Microsoft product, the licensing can be complex. There are two versions of SharePoint: Enterprise and Standard. Standard does not require an additional user CAL for the SharePoint part of things, but has less features; the most important being able to use Office apps directly in the browser. SharePoint is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office, so this is a critical point.

We did evaluate using FileNet as an alternative. We chose SharePoint due to its tighter integration with Microsoft Office.

If you don’t have in-house expertise, you would be well advised to hire a competent consulting firm to help with the planning and installation. You will need to consider things such as in-house servers vs. a hosted solution, along with topology, backup and disaster recovery, security, and capacity plans. And that is just for hardware. You will also need to consider logical architecture: how you want to use social computing, document management, search and metadata structure, records management, and site security. That is just a portion of the details involved.

Beginning with SharePoint 2007, the product has steadily improved with a few minor exceptions.

I used the solution to share the documents on my devices.

The tool’s performance is good. It is also user-friendly, allowing you to download and upload files easily.

SharePoint should not provide frequent updates.

I have been using SharePoint for three to four months.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. Around 1,000 users are using this solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I have been consulting with this solution, combined with SQL server, since 2005. The majority of my consulting at that time changed from Active Directory and C++ to SQL Server and SharePoint.

This solution is a workflow operating system with many metadata services. Information is taken and automatically triggers actions. The specific action is based on the information itself, which is used to calculate a complex answer that results in the action.

I would like a simpler, more cost-effective solution for connecting data sources with workflows and BI tools, or data mining tools. There are different tools for data mining and for data evaluation, but you have to be a skilled programmer to tie them together. There is no simple and low-cost method to do this, provided that development time is a cost factor.

There are some automatic solutions for this task, such as Team Foundation Server, which is built on SharePoint. These tools can learn specific errors that are being made, using data mining techniques, and they are able to target these errors for correction. Having this capability built in, and customizable for the customer would be of great interest.

I would like to see support for Visual Studio to connect to SharePoint and have a wizard to connect data processes to iHubs, like an analysis server or data mining model, to an output, and to have a smart way of creating workflows. Microsoft will tell you that they already have that for SharePoint online, it's called "Flow", but it is not customer compatible.

It is stable after the hotfixes, or service pack has been applied. This has been the case for each release since 2003. If you take the release directly to the customer then it is almost always a big mess for them during implementation.

This solution is extremely scalable. It is a highly performance-optimized web service that you just have to install correctly and then add the machine to the farm with the proper permissions. That is one of the biggest strengths of SharePoint.

Technical support is extremely well developed with Microsoft. It's just that you have to pay for it, so it is not for someone without Software Assurance.

The setup of this solution is complex. There are SharePoint deployment architecture scenarios, and sometimes the C-level deciders underestimate the complexity of it. You have to know SharePoint very well.

For this type of solution, it is not wise to buy it without Software Assurance. It depends on the customer, but most are using an agreement that covers four to ten free incidents per year. You really need that, and it's well-invested money.

When comparing this solution to other workflow operating systems like Oracle or BP Logix, I give this solution a ten out of ten.

My advice for anyone implementing this solution is to first try everything that you want to do in a virtual environment, with people who know how SharePoint is programmed. You need to understand the psychology of business users because most of them omit essential steps when they are creating the business process model. They are used to doing things in their head, but the machine is not aware of everything that they know so some steps are missed.

Ideally, you want to buy a bunch of post-it notes and test your processes manually, by playing with different scenarios. You have to tune the business processes. I have seen projects fail because the debug phase of the business process design was not thorough.

This solution is useful for optimizing usual business processes, like writing an invoice. For any organization with more than one person in it, if they are trying to organize things to let people in the company know what others are doing, then this solution is good for them.

While this workflow operating system is better than others on the market, it is uncomfortable and expensive to really implement what you need. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.