SharePoint Reviews

In general, I find SharePoint to be a very useful tool when it's configured to allow end users a certain amount of flexibility. (In one of my previous assignments, all options were completely locked down. In that kind of configuration, the usefulness of the tool is highly dependent upon whoever configured the product. In this case, they weren't particularly good.) The latest versions of SharePoint are highly useful for configuring pages for managing and conveying large amounts of information, while giving users the ability to pinpoint the specific things they need with speed and accuracy.

Libraries and lists have a feature set that enables capturing large amounts of information and organizing that information in ways that enable multiple audiences/roles to use it effectively.

In my previous job, I built a site to support the PMO. It consisted of a top level site that gave a view of all projects undertaken by the organization and then individual project sites that were used to manage issues, risks, changes, action items, key milestones.

The top level site also contained links out to our scheduling software (SmartSheets). The individual project sites were based on a site template, making it very easy to instantiate a new one whenever a new project was introduced. All project information was contained within a single site collection and allowed both broad and deep searches and visibility of key project metrics.

I think that the current version of the product is actually quite good, but it's not always easy to find solid training and reference information, especially from Microsoft. Typically, third parties have better offerings than Microsoft, but it still requires a bit of searching to find the most relevant and easily absorbed material.

I have used Sharepoint in various forms since around 2003.

Over the last three years (three jobs as well), I've used SharePoint 2007, 2010, and 2013.

I have not encountered stability issues with either the on-premise or cloud hosted versions of the product.

I was never involved in planning for scalability, and have never been aware of any scalability issues in any of the places where I've used the product.

I generally avoid using Microsoft or Microsoft partner support where possible. Unless you are paying for their top-level consultants (which is frightfully expensive), you're often better off just looking things up on the internet and bookmarking the most helpful sites. In situations where support is being provided by internal staff, the results have been variable.

There's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of. You can use wiki's of various sorts and cobble together any number of open source or paid solutions that address a component of what SharePoint does. But that approach doesn't have the current product's level of integration and the maturity of its feature set.

I don't know about setup. It was never my responsibility. Since the products were in place when I arrived, I don't know who the vendors were that partnered with Microsoft to configure and deploy the product.

It's Microsoft; empty your pockets. Seriously, if you obtain SharePoint under one of their blanket licensing agreements you really need to pay attention to the terms and conditions, especially if your acquisition is part of Office 365. It's typically not very easy to drop licenses for a particular subcomponent under such agreements if you find that you're not using that particular piece.

This wasn't my choice. However, there's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of.

Know what you want it for first. Talk to other businesses using the product to understand their experiences. If it looks like SharePoint can bring real business value, then find the best implementation partner that you can find. I don't know the economic ramifications of cloud vs. on-premise, but I found the cloud version of the product takes a lot of headaches out of your hands with Microsoft being responsible to administer and maintain the back end.

Finally, be very wary of proposals from within your company to build all manner of applications, web sites, and data marts with the tool. Although SharePoint is capable of a lot of things, it may be better to purchase a purpose built product rather than rolling your own.

In the same vein, it is still important to have standards and enforce them within the organization, especially on how sites are structured if they are to be used by people in various roles and departments across the enterprise. Someone has to have a vision for the architecture of your SharePoint installation and use in order to assure you get full value. If folks get to do anything they want, you'll have a crazy quilt of unrelated data, applications, and web pages.

• Team site sharing
• Internal collaboration
• Intranet websites
• Document archive storage

Our pre-sales, technical and sales folks use SharePoint to archive files, share configurations and presentations, etc.

Intranet/website publishing tools and features are kludgy and sometimes defy logic.

The ribbon interface is not intuitive. Information rights management is difficult. It is not standards based.

The custom .net usage in fact requires Windows Azure, which takes the complexity to another level. Also, you need to build this into your existing business systems to make full use of the features.

Regarding publishing, there seems to be a gap with HTML 5 publishing tools and/or tools like Dreamweaver and such, which lack strategy, synergy and standards, from my point of view.

Also, searching for information appears based on Bing and that is utterly useless. One needs to bolt a Google search engine onto your solution for optimum results.

SharePoint in either server or cloud offerings is itself very complicated in terms of all the moving parts to consider, which takes time to figure out regarding feature sets and use cases for them.

It would be nice to see a top-notch web-publishing tool that a five year old could use to go with the suite of Office online applications with much better integration with serious 3rd party search tools.

It’s nice to have server or Azure based options, but a hybrid cloud that offers both needs some work. Neither HPE or Dell are competent with their appliance offerings in the CPS space that could be offered as a package, if customized and developed into a single SKU appliance-based platform with all the goodies inside the rack.

Plug, play and connect…customize, develop and deploy. Repeat...

I have used SharePoint for four years at various customers plus my own company.

I have never encountered stability issues.

It has not reached it’s scalability envelope yet.

Outstanding support on SharePoint, in particular from Microsoft.

We used NetMax. The OpenStack Linux stuff is hacked like no other.

Setup is very simple, though all the features take a while to get your arms around (foundation, server, designer, business sync, etc.).

Use volume licensing to get the best pricing from Microsoft for a customer.

We looked at NetMax and various Linux offerings.

Tread slowly and do the basic training.

Feedback workflows ensure we don't miss someone when documents need reviewing and approval workflows make sure the right people are approving it, especially when there are new or temporary staff involved. They don't have to ask who is next in line. They just pick the appropriate workflow and it's all sorted.

We automated task workflows for document review and gathering feedback.

No additional features are needed at the moment, except bringing some of the alerting functionality from the on-premise to the online version.

I have used this for four years.

We did not have any stability problems.

We did not have any scalability problems.

We were using SharePoint 2007. We changed due to the product lifecycle.

Setup was complex. We needed to design governance and implementation architecture before deployment.

Get help. Pricing and licensing is tricky.

We didn’t look at any alternatives.

Consider SharePoint Online unless you have customisations. If you have customisations, try and get rid of them. They cause problems when upgrading.

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.

From my perspective as a developer I would say that the most valuable features are :

• the wide variety of data source connections
• completeness of features
• strong query possibilities (customisation, SQL, MDX, macros)

Each year, managers have to take important decisions about the future based on voluminous reports which took several weeks to produce. Now, these reports have been replaced by a dashboard which is maintained on a daily basis.

• The suite is complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, complicated to work with. Cognos requires a bigger and more skilled centralized BI team.
• Cognos Insight, the self-service, desktop dashboarding and analysis tool designed is not quite at the same level of the competition like Tableau or Qlikview.

We have been using the solution for 19 years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. The version 10.2 we use is very stable.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. The contract between IBM and the organisation covers all the needs we have.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10. I had very few technical support needs but they answer correctly when required.

I am not aware of any previous solutions. I always use Cognos solutions for my BI needs.

The setup was complex. As I work for a large financial organisation, the security matters are very important. For that reason, we had to deploy the different components on many servers in different zones, separated by firewalls. We also had to support the needs for several tens of users for data analysis and a few hundred more users for data consumption.

It's not the least expensive solution in the market but if your needs are great in terms of functionality, number of users and amount of data, it is worth purchasing it.

We evaluated the solutions available at the time. Among others, these were Micro-Level, Business Objects and Hyperion.

I do not think it is possible to implement a solution to the scale of the one we had without the help of knowledgeable Cognos BI resources. Ideally, it is best to hire an expert or one or more good Cognos consultants.

Easy management of content and portal and the document repository features are a distinguishing point compared to a file server.

We use a document library with custom attributes and simple approval workflow. Some program enhancements with .NET enables the Quality Control department to distribute files to an extranet portal after senior Quality Control staff approval. Thousands of documents have been distributed in this way in the past years. This approval flow replaces ordinary emails with much clearer tracking of the workflow process.

Notification templates should be editable without coding. Also, summary notifications should be customizable too.

I’ve been using SharePoint for nine years.

When the number of documents in a library grows too high, there will be performance issues. There is no easy way to archive files uploaded to SharePoint unless you have extra budget to get 3rd party solutions like AvePoint.

Scalability is not a problem as long as you can virtualize the SharePoint server farm. Hardware speed acceleration could overcome the software limitation. In my case, one front-end server served 700 users.

Technical support is done by our vendor, not directly from Microsoft. My vendor was good on supporting SharePoint.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup wizard helps you with the install. It is straightforward and easy.

Pricing on the server itself is acceptable, but CAL licenses could be an issue if you are not an Enterprise Agreement subscriber, or you are opening SharePoint 2007 to external users. With the new license model on SharePoint online, the issue here is not applicable.

We evaluated Documentum.

I don't think anybody nowadays should deploy SharePoint 2007. However, the SharePoint online that comes with Office 365 is worth a look. But beware of sizing as the fee is charged by data size and processing resources that would affect your SharePoint online response time.

• Ability to collaborate with others in organization
• Ease of use
• Customization

All employees can view necessary interactions/documents, great task management and contact management functions.

Document libraries and document management could be improved.

I have used SharePoint for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.`

We have never required support.

We did not have any previous solutions.

There are free versions that satisfy most needs.

In our scenario, Team Portal was a really useful feature.

We used to keep all of our documentation on SharePoint. SharePoint's version control worked really well with our large range of documents.

Configuration and troubleshooting need improvement, especially regarding TFS integration.

I’ve used this for more than eight years as an integration with the Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

We had stability issues regarding the TFS integration.

We didn’t have any scalability issues.

In Brazil and India, I thought technical support was really poor. In my case, my tickets were transferred to international support. They weren’t able to help me.

We did not have a previous solution.

It was very easy to install, like most Microsoft products. I love Microsoft's way of keeping their setups very similar.

I don't have enough experience with SharePoint's pricing and licensing to give my opinion.

We didn’t look at alternatives. Integration with TFS was crucial to our teams.

I think they can look for free options in the case of small teams of five to ten members. Otherwise, this is an amazing option. I am very satisfied.