SharePoint Reviews

It offers an easy way to store unstructured content (.pdf, .doc, .xls, images) and to tag them with metadata. More complex solutions may involve workflow up receipt of the content.

Replace paper file cabinets with electronic images which can be duplicated for disaster recovery purposes. Workflow can be used to notify or obtain approval covering the document.

Too many versions being released in a short time period. Too much time being devoted to migration planning.

Over 10 years, working with different versions up through 2013.

Stability issues are usually related to poor architecture planning, or solutions developed without a knowledge of how the tool works.

If properly deployed, the solution is very scalable. It’s really easy to have many servers in a farm solution, and many farms in an enterprise solution.

Trying to get technical support from Microsoft is always challenging. It seems large Fortune 1000 companies can get support.

You can deploy a web/database solution but it will take a lot of development time. SharePoint is a Rapid Application Development platform where a simple library, indexed, can be deployed in minutes.

The setup is straightforward, however many of the architecture issues should be discussed prior to deployment. Matching the setup to the organization’s needscan make the installation complex.

It’s not cheap. Through version 2010, there was a "free" version called Foundation. All of the good features are in the Standard and Enterprise versions. Starting with 2013, the Foundation version was discontinued.
Licensing can be by server or by seat.

There are similar solutions, like Lotus Notes/Domino and open source versions.

Open source rarely offers support, and I wouldn’t want to have a systems issue with all of my content locked up.

As long as you work within the constraints of the software, working with out-of-the-box tools, the product is great. If you start to customize the solution too much or install code on the servers, migrations and upgrades become a problem.

Spend some time and money up front discussing your wants and needs with someone who is knowledgeable. For content management, think about the whole lifecycle, from receipt to purging the content from your system.

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.

• Documents storage
• Collaboration features (lists, discussion boards)
• Surveys
• .NET extensibility
• Workflows

Mostly, because it facilitates collaboration and the ability to create custom workflows.

For the past few years, we've been mapping some of our manual procedures into SharePoint, through the use of lists, workflows, centralized documents, etc. This has allowed our organization to start moving away from manual and non-standard practices, to more repeatable procedures.

Flexibility and extensibility, above everything, could be improved. Extending the functionality of SharePoint is painful, at the bare minimum. Complex .NET coding, testing, debugging is necessary to extend the native functionalities. Even with the new "apps" concept in SharePoint 2013, the difficulties in expanding it are present.

I’ve been using SharePoint for the last three years.

We have had difficulty with stability. The configuration and administration of SharePoint is complex. This resulted in incidents when changes to other products were made, like Active Directory or Exchange. Time consuming maintenance tasks are necessary, otherwise your SharePoint instance will become unstable.

We have had scalability issues. I cannot speak about horizontal scalability, but the mapping of environments (Dev, QA, Production) is difficult. There's no logical segmentation that allows the creation of several environments to facilitate development and testing tasks. Additional instances of SharePoint are necessary.

Support is deficient. We depend on local vendors to get access to support and most of the issues we presented took more time to resolve that we wanted. It is not a platform for running business-critical applications.

We did not have a previous solution.

Initial setup was complex. The multi-step installation process is complex and has too many dependencies on other Microsoft products, such as Exchange and SQL Server.

I cannot speak about this as our product comes in an MSDN package.

Unfortunately there were no alternatives; I didn't choose this product.

Look for other options from different providers.

I have found SharePoint team sites to produce much more value to our organization. As a consulting company, it allows multiple consultants to collaborate on a team project for a customer.

We use SharePoint for company-wide document management.

Although the workflow is limited in SharePoint, we have used it for many boarding processes, PTO requests etc.

SharePoint has streamlined many processes and has provided additional organization for our company. It has become a central location for both documents and productivity.

SharePoint has workflow built into the software however it is very simplistic. Third party applications integrate with SharePoint to provide a more feature full workflow. For example, if I wanted to create a workflow for new employee onboarding process I could use SharePoint built in workflow. Doing so would provide me limited configuration options, no version control, only attach to one list, sequential workflow only, and not very customizable.

Using a third party you can create intuitive workflows, customize branding with CSS, easy drag and drop implementation, comprehensive workflows actions (loops, foreach, parallel actions, variables), and maintain retention history.

I would like to see it built-in the product itself.

I have used this solution for two years.

Some stability issues have been found with the database. From the infrastructure side, most people use dedicated databases for SharePoint so a simple reboot usually fixes the communication issues.

SharePoint is extremely scalable but requires planning ahead of time.

You must answer some questions about your environment in order to determine the number of servers and also as to what SharePoint function(s) they will serve for meeting the demands of your organization.

I have never used Microsoft technical support for SharePoint in particular. However, Microsoft support is very good.

Initially, we were using simple file shares and emails for this purpose.

SharePoint can be very complex to set up initially both in terms of the infrastructure as well as the backend design and implementation. The more scalable the environment, the more complex the setup will be. Generally, third-party consultants will be needed to implement the solution.

There are two options with SharePoint. They have an on-premises and a cloud solution as well.

We have not evaluated any other solution before this one.

You will need to hire and communicate with a third-party consultant.

Among the most useful features I like are: the site permissions (distributed governance model), the social enterprise features (micro blogs, activity feeds, community sites, Following, Likes and Reputations), app store, search and query, external data access, security, site management and site customizations.

It's been a process-improvement catalyst in the sense that it enabled and empowered real-time collaboration and dashboard tracking of business intelligence reports and performance analytics. It's certainly reduced the number of hours needed to create, update and maintain worksheets and forms hosted on legacy systems, databases and it also reduced overhead on obsolete file repositories.

Well, for SharePoint Online, the add-on features which are free tend to expire within a month or earlier. It would be great if these free add-on features would last longer or last permanently.

I have been using SharePoint since 2012.

We have not encountered any deployment issues, fortunately.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The customer service I would rate a 3.5 out of 5 (5 being highest); responsive, timely, proactive.

The tech support I would rate a 3.5 out of 5 (5 being highest); responsive, strategic, proactive and precise.

We used an open-source CMS (Joomla-based) and due to the limitations, we switched to SharePoint.

Very straightforward setup and not that complex.

We used our in-house support team to deliver the implementation.

Not sure about ROI.

Do your due diligence first and conduct an in-depth discovery session with stakeholders prior to designing your solution that uses SharePoint as a platform

We evaluated Alfresco and Confluence, and then decided on SharePoint.

Ease of use, ease of setup, ease of administration, ease of configuration, ease of customization... what's not to like? SharePoint's got exactly what you need. Just don't expect too many frills, bells, whistles in terms of UI, but even then, it gets the job done.

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.

Depending on the customer’s needs, one or more features become more relevant and important. If I were to generalize and extract the most common features that the customers have used, I would say:

• Web\document content management
• Integration with the Office suite
• Collaboration over the content, sites, BI, search, and workflows
• One or two-way integration with other enterprise applications

I see the strength of SharePoint working as an extendable framework/platform for customers of various sizes, on premise as well as on the cloud, but not as an independent niche product/solution around a specific feature.

Our Intranet is built using SocialXtend, a SharePoint based product.

It has transformed the way we do our daily tasks and the way the departments collaborate over projects, opportunities, and other operational activities.

Knowledge sharing and access to information has been highly simplified.

Almost all of the areas of the product have room for improvement; some more than others.

• At a high level, mobile, custom development/testing frameworks, BCS, external services integration, and BI may need to catch up more as compared to the other feature sets.
• SharePoint is a combination of multiple products working together. It has come a long way, and the improvements are being pushed at a much faster pace than they used to be earlier. This fail-fast approach of adding features quickly instead of a longer release cycle is a much better way to develop a product in my opinion.

I have been using SharePoint since 2001 in multiple capacities, such as a solution host, or as a full-fledged enterprise solution for on premise, as well as on the cloud.

My personal observation is that if the implementations are done in the right way by following the recommended best practices and guidelines, the product works just fine.

To be clear, I am referring to all the underlying products (IIS, SQL Server) as well as to the O/S.

There have been genuine issues. However, we have used SharePoint and CU to address them.

We have not had scalability issues in SharePoint 2010 and onwards.

Technical support is good.

We used solutions from the Java world. Those, as well as this one, are based on the customers' needs.

For simple farms, things are pretty straightforward. But for complex farms, I have not yet had that experience.

To be fair, it’s not SharePoint all the time. It’s a combination of other environmental factors and third-party products as well.