SharePoint Reviews

• Document management supports a wide range of capabilities including cross-folder views, custom views, group-by views, versioning, alerts, MS Office integration, workflows, and very flexible permissioning.
• Collaboration in general is quite capable, including calendars, tasks, custom lists, and the ability to easily view data from within MS Office, as well as the built-in apps support found in both cloud and on premises versions.
• Search is exceptionally powerful, supporting a range of hybrid on-premises and cloud configurations, with customizable display templates and refiners.
• The ability to leverage multi-level Taxonomy is useful for hierarchies, views, filters and navigation.
• The out-of-the-box Workflow capabilities are good, and easily extensible with excellent third-party applications.
• We found SharePoint makes an excellent framework for developing an intranet, with built-in support for multi-language versions that adapt to the user's preferred language.
• SharePoint has several excellent available APIs for extension, customization and integration with LOB applications.

By creating a platform for collaboration, it empowers users to collaborate and work together on documents, tasks and calendars.

PowerShell for Office 365 is exceptionally limited. The CmdLets available for SharePoint Online are focused on site provisioning and permissioning, and do not include CmdLets for managing Items, documents, libraries, folders, default metadata, tagging, and views.

Development can be a challenge, especially as the development model and direction promoted by Microsoft rapidly evolves, and product components get deprecated. The App model is necessarily restrictive in what it allows to be done, in order to maintain the stability in the multi-tenancy environment. This leads to moving to either client-side object model development, or splitting the application with some functionality done on dedicated servers outside the cloud-based SharePoint environment.

I have used this solution for 14 years

The early RTP versions can be buggy. There are always challenges with patches, but the product has improved over time.

The product is designed for scalability, except for the List View Threshold limitation.

Technical support is poor. Microsoft makes it tough to get quality support.

Initial setup is somewhat complex; it requires a professional for installation and configuration.

Cloud is the cheapest, but less flexible. The cost of the product is quite reasonable considering the feature set. The larger portion of the cost of the product is getting good professional help in shaping it to the organization's needs.

Before choosing this product, we explored alternatives such as Documentum from EMC (now spun off to OpenText), Slack, Box, Dropbox and even WordPress and Jive. However, for all-around capabilities that include not just document management, workflows, calendar, task management, blogging, calendars and overall business process management, we deemed SharePoint as the best overall.

WordPress for basic websites or Intranet is great, but there is no direct competitor for the full breadth of SharePoint. However, for narrow sets of functions, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Wedoist, Slack, and others offer competition.

Get a real professional to work with your team. Ensure training and collaborative working with users is included in your deployment plan. Adoption is key.

SharePoint is the ideal platform in the collaboration scenario where is quite easy to set up document repositories with appropriate permissions with just few mouse clicks.

In a publishing/internet scenario, it has a powerful publishing infrastructure that allows editors to publish contents with predefined layouts in a quick and easy way, with features like scheduled publish and unpublish, caching for page load performance and multilingual site support.

The search capabilities empower the company to create new kinds of applications that in the past used to be implemented with a web/database application and now can be realized using SharePoint lists and libraries as a backend.

It helped us particularly with document digitalization, both from a repository standpoint and from a project documentation sharing and co-authoring perspective, with great integration with the MS Office suite.

It also helped us manage simple processes that used to be carried out through email and now are centralized in a single spot.

It would be nice if the platform made it easier to implement a complete document management process (digitalization, OCR, protocols, etc.) without the need to integrate software from different vendors.

I’ve been using SharePoint for six years, including previous versions.

We have not really had stability issues, particularly in the 2013 version.

Once the guidelines and the hardware requirements are fulfilled, the performance result is in line with expectations. Beyond that, SharePoint 2013 has been created with scalability in mind, with all services deployable on an on-demand basis, independently, even on a dedicated machine. In addition, is pretty easy to scale services when you require more performance.

Fortunately, we did not encounter major issues, but support has been generally good.

I did not use a previous solution.

We used a consultancy company to set up the environment and everything has been deployed within the estimated time frame. The seamless integration with Active Directory made it easy to provide access to all company users.

Pricing is in line with other enterprise products. For a small company, the cloud version might be more suitable from a licensing cost standpoint. Bigger companies should take a decision based on the size of the IT department and the number of users involved, which can make an on-premises solution more convenient.

We thought about an open source solution, but the features and the support provided wasn’t sufficient to satisfy our organization’s needs.

Like other products similar to this, it is very important to pay attention to employee’s training regarding the use of the platform. They should be prepared for the change. Otherwise, they would be tempted to reject it without evaluating properly the advantages.

Collaboration with other Microsoft products has made SharePoint a real tool for us. You can use a personal OneDrive storage to share your own documents with others, but also use SharePoint sites to manage projects with external users.

All attachments are put under SharePoint. So, no more of network sharing is required to store documents. Document versioning is also a useful feature for our organization.

No need to worry any more about emails with attachments and obsolete versions with those attachments. People can edit an online version at the same time. You don’t have to save and send anything anymore.

Though Office 365 Groups is only partly based on SharePoint Online, it gives a great option to share team information with inside and outside users.

SharePoint Online is excellent as is, but licensing for the on-premises version is expensive.

I have been using this product for eight years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. It is an excellent product if you don’t have to customize it too much.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support level 9/10.

I did not use any other solutions prior to SharePoint and I would not change to another product either.

Setup is very straightforward when you know the architecture.

I didn’t evaluate other products.

Keep it simple. Make use of this product without huge amounts of custom applications and scripting.

For intranet and file sharing and internal communications.

Yes, especially reducing the print paper and having a very quick response, and reducing the time between department and people.

Sharing and workflow.

Special implementation and development should be easy.

Stability is OK.

Scalability is OK.

Partner was not good. They did not have so much experience.

FileNet and Documentum.

Very hard.

Vendor and partner.

I did not measure, but it is useful.

Pricing is very high.

No.

No.

To initially set up as part of a records management initiative. The company I was working for needed to better track and support how and where documents are located. 

While there were plenty of out-of-the-box solutions for records management projects, this probably under-utilized aspect of SharePoint can help better track documents and retention. 

Ease of implementation. Certainly, IT needs to give appropriate access to a sandbox, but learning is easy and quick.

Microsoft seems to always be making changes. Sometimes you will get a message saying some aspect of what they deliver is being discontinued and often you simply never had time to explore what it had to offer in the first place.