When properly configured and understood, SharePoint can be an extremely valuable company portal for all manner of office-related functions, including document management, file sharing with versioning, forms, workflows, etc. The platform is also capable of custom applications with database connectors.
Currently, it is used as the default website for Intranet. Sites are available for each department. News and announcements are available on the main page, as well as the company directory. A custom HR portal has also been developed to be the method for onboarding and offboarding employees.
It is not very intuitive to most users. It can be customized, but it requires a SME with a great deal of experience and training.
I would like to see Microsoft build better site templates to help kick start those new to the SharePoint environment. Better documentation, training, and tutorials would also help as well.
I have been using SharePoint for over ten years.
We have not encountered any stability issues.
We have not encountered any scalability issues.
Technical support is average.
I’ve not used any other tools.
It’s now available as a part of Office 365, but a local, on-premises install has some advantages if keeping everything inside your Intranet is important.
Find out how others are using it. Examine good examples of custom applications and workflows. Consider using commercial add-ons as well.
When properly implemented and users are adequately trained, SharePoint can take the place of network file shares for most types of use cases. Instead of users never knowing where to find documents, or which document is the current version, SharePoint makes it easy to share documents and set permissions. A classic workflow that SharePoint handles easily is the review and edit of a document by multiple individuals. By using a workflow, each person that needs to review and edit one or more documents is notified by email, can edit the document (and depending on your release and configuration, multiple users can edit at the same time), and mark their workflow task as done. There is none of the confusion of emailing a group of people a copy of a document, getting all their edits back with a different copy for each person. With workflows, each person edits the same document and the initiator of the workflow knows when each person completes their review/edit. Later releases of SharePoint extend this functionality to the cloud, adding file synchronization for mobile devices.
Out of the box, SharePoint is not known for intuitiveness, and administrators and users alike tend to have a difficult time creating effective and usable sites. However, with some time and effort, and good training, it can be a very valuable tool and centralized location for a company or department. One very useful type of SharePoint site that can be created is a “Meeting Space”, where regular/recurring meetings are held. Agendas for each meeting can be setup, along with tasks assigned to each member, as well as a document library for documents related to each meeting. Project management sites are another useful tool for managing collaborations and project tracking, with optional integration with Microsoft Project.
Sharepoint is Microsoft’s document sharing and collaboration tool. It allows you to share and manage documents, and to build websites – so it’s a content management system too. In my previous role I was strapped to the mast of Sharepoint: we needed to share files across the world, previously we used shared network drives, as a byproduct individual teams can also create websites. There were close on 100,000 of us at my previous employer.
The file sharing/content management schizophrenia can lead to horrible websites, on a normal website you might expect that following a link in a page will take you seamlessly to another web page to be rendered in your browser. Not in Sharepoint: the siren voice of the file sharing side means that all to often website authors are going to link you to documents – so you hit a link and if you’re lucky you get asked whether you want to open a document in Microsoft Office, if you’re unlucky you get asked to enter your credentials first. Either way it breaks your expectation as to what a website should do: hit link – go to another webpage.
For every function you can imagine Sharepoint has a tick in the box:
The problem is that whilst it nominally ticks these boxes it is uniformly awful at implementing them. I’ve used WordPress and Blogger for blogging, phpBB for discussion forums, moinmoin and Project Forum wiki software, source control software, twitter, delicious, bit.ly, Yammer for social media and in comparison Sharepoint’s equivalent is laughable.
This ineptitude has spawned a whole industry of companies plugging the gaps.
Sharepoint does feature some neat integration into Microsoft Office: viewing shared calendars in Outlook, saving directly to Sharepoint from office application but this facility is a bit flakey – Office will try to auto-populate a "My SharePoint sites" area but does it via a cryptic set of rules which can’t be relied on to give you access to all of your sites.
For the technically minded part of the problem is the underlying product but part of the problem is down to how your company decides to implement Sharepoint. My WordPress-based site looks pretty much how I want it, bar the odd area where my CSS-fu has proved inadequate. In a corporate Sharepoint environment other people’s design decisions are foisted upon me, although Sharepoint’s underlying design often seems to be the root of the problem
Take this piece of design (shown below), this is part of the new Sharepoint social media facilities but it’s ugly as sin, most of what you see for each Note is Sharepoint boilerplate (Posted a note on – View Related Activities – Delete) rather than your content, furthermore I have repeatedly set my dates to format dd/mm/yyyy in the UK style and this part of my site remains steadfastly on the US mm/dd/yyyy format.
Here’s another nasty piece of design.The core of the document sharing facility is the Document Library, below is a default view of one of my libraries (with some blurring). All of the Sharepointy magic for a document is run off a dropdown menu accessed via a small downward pointing triangle on the "Name" field, the little triangle is only visible when you float over that particular line, note also that if you click on the name in the name field then that takes you to the document – so you trigger two different behaviours in one field.
Other items in this table are hyperlinks but take you to entirely uninteresting content.
It didn’t have to be this way, the Document Library could functionality could have been integrated into the Windows File Explorer. Applications like the source control software TortoiseSVN and TortoiseHG do this, putting little overlays onto file icons and providing functionality via the right click menu. Windows 7 even has a panel at the bottom of the screen which seems to offer quasi-Sharepoint functionality – you can set tags for documents which could map to the "properties" that Sharepoint uses.
Users are familiar with the file explorer, Sharepoint discards that familiarity for a new, clunky web-based alternative. Furthermore users sharing files are often moving from a directory-based shared hard-drive scheme, Sharepoint allows you to use directories in Document Libraries but it breaks the property-based view which is arguably a better scheme but forcing users over to it wholesale is unreasonable.
In summary: Sharepoint suffers from trying to be a system to share documents and a system for making websites. It features a poor web interface for functionality which could be integrated into the Windows file explorer.
What made you choose this over an in-house solution?