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There are in fact two versions of SharePoint: the on-premises version, SharePoint 2019, and SharePoint Online, which comes bundled in Microsoft 365 (the Cloud). Though those with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) automatically have the latest features in SharePoint Online; those with on-premises SharePoint, have to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest.

SharePoint’s greatest strength is it’s an all-in-one approach – it’s a portal, a content management system, a search engine, a social collaboration platform, a web development platform, and so much more. Its greatest weakness is that it’s an all-in-one solution – everything and the kitchen sink; a jack-of-all-trades, a master of none. Some argue that SharePoint is a “mile wide, but a foot deep.” It offers so much, but some features are seen as still ‘developing’ or even sub-par. But there are a lot of tools and features, and with each release, it gets better and better (though more complex).

“With Microsoft 365, Microsoft currently offers the most powerful communication and collaboration suite on the market. And the latest announcements from the Microsoft Ignite conference across the main workloads like SharePoint, Teams and Powell Apps prove that they continue to move forward fast in order to stay ahead of the game,” says Antoine Faisandier, CEO of Powell Software, a Digital Workplace software that extends and enhances the Office 365 capabilities.

It’s important to note that SharePoint is still a technology. It doesn’t include all of the people, process and planning that is required to make any intranet technology work. Intranet technology will fail without careful planning, process and committed people. Most of the key ingredients of a successful intranet in the digital workplace are based on people, and process; technology is merely an enabler.

Among the latest features, building upon earlier versions of SharePoint:

1. Delve / My Profile (About Me) - My Sites disappears in favor of a new profile, About Me, that also uses the Delve inference engine.
2. Cloud / Hybrid - Hybrid enables you to integrate your on-premises farm with the cloud, at your own pace.
3. Durable Links - Resource-based URLs now retain links when documents are renamed or moved in SharePoint.
4. Image and video previews - Preview images and videos in SharePoint Server 2016 document libraries.
5. Large files - now supports uploading and downloading files larger than 2,047 MBs
6. Mobile - an improved mobile navigation experience.
7. Search - SharePoint Search has now fully integrated the FAST Search engine, with more features, and indexes up to 500 milliion documents (per app).
8. Sharing - better user sharing options, including a Shared folder, and invitation email notifications.
9. Microsoft Teams - online communication platform for team or project sites, akin to an enhanced Team Site, but with chat, presence, inline calling and messaging, and integration with Outlook and Calendar and most other apps. It now includes voice mail.

We are Intranet consultants (www.PrescientDigital.com) and and principally use Microsoft 365 - SharePoint Online for Enterprise Content Management; improving the way our organization functions in terms of employee collaboration and knowledge sharing specifically via document management, and social collaboration (discussion groups, profiles and blogging being the most used social tools). Increasingly we use Teams, and use it with external clients that can be invited to a specific Team (project site).

Web content management and social media tools (e.g. wikis) are not best-of-breed, and usability is an issue with many features. We also encountered many, many problems with deployment -- customization and implementation requires more work than you expect. Additionally, like most organizations, a customized user experience can break (particularly specific webparts) with every SharePoint patch and upgrade. However, we found no issues with stability or scalability. 

80% of our clients use SharePoint, and probably some 85% of the Fortune 1000 use SharePoint in some shape or form. We are first and foremost SharePoint intranet consultants, so we build and design other intranets, and need to deeply understand the ins and outs of SharePoint. 

The initial setup of SharePoint is very easy - out-of-the-box deployment is simple, fast and a novice could manage a deployment. Customization requires a lot of work, particularly using SPFx (hiring an outside expert is strongly recommended).

A note of caution: planning is everything. The intranet is more about people and process, and any intranet requires a through plan -- for information architecture, content management, design, and change management -- plan, plan, plan. And plan to run over-budget (unless you hire very strong outside experts to develop and run your plan and budget) for customization activities. 

SharePoint features major upgrades to the user experience design and mobile access, including a new dedicated SharePoint app. The UX for SharePoint 2019 is noticeably superior to previous versions of SP. It’s very clean and modern, with a major emphasis on images, and video. The new "modern UX" is fully responsive, and has it's own dedicated mobile app.

“SharePoint 2019 has the most UX (improvements) than we’ve ever delivered before in a SharePoint release,” Hani Loza, of the Microsoft SharePoint team, on www.IntranetBlog.com.

Among the new UX features, particularly noticeable in the new SharePoint Communications Sites, are drag-and-drop web parts for image galleries, slideshows, hero slideshow, and video.

Continue reading: The New SharePoint: SharePoint 2019

SharePoint is appreciated for its simplicity of use out-of-the-box, though derided for problems (and the expenses) customizing the user experience (design, navigation and information architecture).

SharePoint is replete with functionality and applications, and is the most comprehensive intranet development platform on the market. It is, unfortunately, expensive, and most of the feature set that we use, and that our clients use, fall short of expectations, and often below best-of-breed. SharePoint isn’t a niche product that is supposed to be superb at web content management, or social networking; it’s a broad solution, one that has something for everybody; a solution that can please some, but not all.

SharePoint’s greatest strength is that it’s an all-in-one solution – it’s a portal, a content management system, a search engine, a social collaboration platform, a web development platform, and so much more. Its greatest weakness is that it’s an all-in-one solution – everything and the kitchen sink; a jack-of-all-trades, a master of none. Some argue that SharePoint is a “mile wide, but a foot deep.” It offers so much, but many features are seen as sub-par. 

SharePoint is part enterprise content management (ECM) solution, part portal solution, part web development platform, part social media platform. It offers many, many solutions and functions – often too much for most organizations – but it is Microsoft’s hope that it will become everything to everybody including the de facto platform for the company intranet, website(s) and extranet(s). In sum total, it is an amazingly powerful solution, but often fails to live up to expectations.

SharePoint 2013 was a fair solution, with an abundance of time, patience… and money, it could work; SharePoint 2016, is even better, but still requires a lot of care, and investment.

The latest, SharePoint 2019 (and SharePoint Online in Office 365), further improves upon previous versions, notably the mobile experience and the user experience. 

SharePoint has a new mobile app, so you can access your intranet using a phone app, instead of using the browser. Outside of the app, SharePoint has a new, clean mobile experience – greatly enhanced over the mobile experience in SharePoint 2016.

Another big, major improvement to SharePoint is the new user experience (UX) design and general usability of SharePoint. It is noticeably superior to previous versions of SP. It’s very clean and modern, with a major emphasis on images, and video.

“SharePoint 2019 has the most UX (improvements) than we’ve ever delivered before in a SharePoint release,” Hani Loza, of the Microsoft SharePoint team.

Among the new UX features, particularly noticeable in the new SharePoint Communications Sites, are drag-and-drop web parts for image galleries, slideshows, hero slideshow, and video.

Microsoft has released a new video function and portal, called Stream. Using Microsoft Stream, videos will play automatically in a page, and it includes auto transcription, face detection, and enhanced sharing and tagging. The Stream team say “audio transcriptions and face detection make finding relevant content easy—even for specific words or people shown on screen, whether in a single video or across all your company’s videos.”

From a governance perspective, SharePoint is good, when compared to other platforms. It is not perfect, but no solution is.

Like the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology agnostic; whether it’s SharePoint or another portal or content management platform, the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same. In short, governance lives and dies with its owners, and the rules they put in place, regardless of the technology. Governance is largely applicable to any technology platform and as such is generic to start.

When building a governance model for SharePoint, the major components should include:

• The umbrella ownership model – Centralized? Decentralized? Collaborative?
• Defined ownership structure (names and titles)
• Roles and responsibilities (jobs and duties)
• Decision making process (who is responsible for what and when)
• Authorization (who is responsible for what and when)
• Policy (what is allowed, and what is not allowed)

While governance is generic in nature, regardless of the software and hardware, there are some components of SharePoint that require specific consideration. Site Collections and Team Sites are so easy to deploy, and it is so easy for even the most neophyte web users to create a site (e.g. Team Sites, My Sites, Publishing Sites, etc.), SharePoint sites can easily grow at exponential rates and amount to tens-of-thousands in a short period of time. ‘Baking’ in rules and inheritance to site collections is critical to ensuring a consistent, uniform user experience.

These issues and others are discussed in-depth including, SharePoint governance, and some of the specific, requisite steps and policies for implementing intranet and in the SharePoint Governance white paper.

To learn about the specifics of intranet design with SharePoint, see the Intranet Design white paper.