SharePoint Reviews

Majority of our employees (around 800) all have Office 365 E3 Enterprise licences. Using at first purely email and Skype, we have now created a SharePoint Intranet and all users now use OneDrive.

Teams are now being linked to SharePoint document libraries and embraced by many of our departments. Yammer is now the centre communication tool for company-wide information. We are starting to find the benefits of Power BI, Forms, and Stream.

It has allowed improved auditing and opened up the cloud. Considerable in-house savings. We are able to add IRM and DLP to company information. This has made the auditors happy.

We have given users a common platform and increased reporting. Information is now available instantly to managers on all devices. 

The ability to take Excel files and make them dynamic SharePoint lists with instant reporting capabilities has been a major benefit. Teams are now heavily used in how all our departments work.

Skype/Teams are now the main way our company communicates internally. OneDrive and SharePoint provide a secure, fully auditable way of storing information.

You still need a bit of expertise to add branding. It is still important to have Super Users to keep moving sites forward. 

The company needs to make sure that their policies are dictating how information is stored and used, instead of letting SharePoint take control. 

Annoyingly, many new Office 365 apps always end up being only US locale for the first year of their life. Microsoft needs to realise that most of their customers are not in the USA. 

More than five years.

I have found team sites offer much 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 companywide document management.

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

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

I would love to see a more robust workflow. There are 3rd party products such as Nintex and K2 that can be used, however I would like to see it built-in.

I’ve used SharePoint for 2 years.

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 to determine how many servers and what SharePoint function(s) they will serve to meet the demands of your organization.

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

We used to use simple file shares and emails.

SharePoint can be very complex to setup initially (both infrastructure and back end design and implementation). The more scalable the environment, the more complex the setup will be. Generally speaking, a 3rd party consultant will be needed to implement the solution.

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

We did not look at alternatives.

Hire and communicate with a 3rd party consultant.

• 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.

The features that I find most valuable are:

• Indexing
• Search
• BI
• Custom apps model
• Team sites
• My Site
• Integration with Yammer

SharePoint provides out-of-the-box data indexing and caching. BI is optional and driven by content population as well as external sources import. Custom App model is a platform allowing for a variety of home-grown or enterprise based solutions. We have a local team developing proprietary applications available via an in-house App store that is rolled out either globally across all pages, or individually per team site.

With the use of “My Site”, we were able to minimize our data center shared drive footprint and roll most user data into a searchable database. SharePoint provides file level,content security, and shifting data management to the customer.

With version management and recovery options, customers can easily restore files from the recycle bin. However, once files are removed, administrators are forced to turn to third-party tools. Administrative recovery and data management need more attention. File recovery is not made simple. Once files are discarded from within the SharePoint product, recovery turns into a long process of restoration from databases.

Alternatively we use a third party product by AvePoint called DocAve. It allows for an easy point and click recovery preserving original security permissions, which is not possible with direct database restoration. I would like to see a native Microsoft product do this.

We have used this product for two years.

With an on-premise, or even a hybrid model, local operations and platform teams are responsible for the uptime of the system. Most common issues are service halt, drive space management, and database corruption. All of this can be resolved easily with an Office 365 infrastructure migration.

Scalability was not an issue for us at the time of deployment. Capacity planning and resource management was done well. However, scalability issues with the current version is done much better than in previous versions

The quality of technical support depended on the support contract and severity of the issue. An enterprise level contract allows us to raise Priority 1 cases which are addressed on a 24/7 basis. Most issues were resolved promptly.

We upgraded from SharePoint 2007 and 2010. Data migration was the biggest culprit. The main reason for an upgrade was to provide easier platform management.

Deploying essential components was fairly straightforward. "MySite" page customization for multi-brand organization was a bit complicated due to the application of custom templates and role-based access control.

Do your homework and work closely with the vendor during capacity planning. Think a few years ahead.

We did not evaluate other products. However, also invested into WordPress and Kentico CMS under the MS Azure PaaS environment.

Make sure the product meets your business needs. Once you make that decision, rollout the proper internal marketing and adoption of the product. Workshops are available by Microsoft along with adoption recommendations.

The feature that it works on any device, any place and anywhere for everyone.

Microsoft Office 365 has provided us many ways to share documents across a diversity of platforms with a diversity of people (both inside and outside our company).

Synchronization of files in OneDrive can take some time which can ‘annoy’ some users.

At my current company we are using it one year, personally I’ve been using Microsoft Office 365 around 3 years

Since we came from a Small Business Server the Exchange migration is a minor point of attention. There is no mailbox by mailbox migration, but only a cut-over migration. Furthermore we had some issues with MacBook users and their Office settings. Also we encountered some issues with mail not arriving correctly. This was NOT caused by Microsoft Office 365. A support partner had hardcoded settings which were not communicated. Once we deleted these hardcoded settings, the problems were solved within one hour.

There are no issues with stability.

There are no issues with scalability.

Customer Service: The level of customer service could be better, but it all depends on the person in the other side.Technical Support: The level of technical support could be better, but it all depends on the person in the other side.

We had a Small Business Server environment which has a cap in the user environment. Since we grew out of the number of users, we had to change. Microsoft Office 365 was the fastest and most powerful way for both short and long term vision.

It was straightforward, since the migration wizard provided by Microsoft is a good wizard for the environment we have.

We did an in-house implementation.

No

Take a good look at what your customers wants and needs are before choosing any other product than what you’re currently using. This will make implementation and migration easier and also makes it easier for people to change to a new platform. With Microsoft Office 365 things changed radically in our environment, which had its effect on the day-to-day business, although none which couldn’t be resolved, but a good discovery and inventory before making choices is the better option.

Our primary use case for SharePoint is for document sharing and file sharing in projects where participants are from different organizations. It is a very good tool for users or participants of teams from different tenants inside the organization.

What I like most about SharePoint would depend on what the task is, e.g. if it's just simple document sharing then the document library is fine. The most exciting feature of the platform is that it's a no code or low code development platform. There's also Power Apps and Power Automate.

Despite the enthusiasm and very good promises offered by SharePoint, the usage of the power platform is limited, so that's an area for improvement, but I would suggest this just as a team feature.

It's hard to highlight other areas for improvement, but a better approach towards licensing power platform components for guest users would be great. SharePoint licensing costs could be lowered to introduce it to the outside guests of a tenant, then to supply them with power apps and power automate features.

A more straightforward integration with Azure, including better licensing in terms of using Azure components and functions, is also another area for improvement in SharePoint.

My advice for Microsoft, and this is something I'd like to see in the next release of  SharePoint, is for them to constantly improve training material. Currently, the training material is organized in a way where a new feature appears and is enforced, then they develop the training material for that new feature. What happens is that the total product or solution, e.g. SharePoint, then lacks overall introduction in terms of training. There should be a balance between the introduction of the tool and the introduction of the new feature. They should have comprehensive introductory courses for both Office 365 and SharePoint, instead of needing to Google for particular situations. I'm trying to get the knowledge bit by bit, so I'm losing the idea of the whole product, e.g. SharePoint is losing its essence. To get onboarded to any new product, it's important to get a good introduction into that product.

I've been using SharePoint since 2006, so I've seen its "many flavors".

I find SharePoint to be stable. No complaints there.

I have no complaints about the scalability of SharePoint.

The support system for SharePoint works pretty well. We had a complicated situation about the reasoning why tenants and users are limited in terms of functionality, and the escalation and resolving of that issue, of that situation, went pretty fast, even for experimental features. It was quite straightforward to get access to experimental features, or find out why this access is limited, then fix it. I'm happy with the technical support for SharePoint.

The initial setup of SharePoint is very straightforward. Microsoft did a very good job with onboarding new users of their platform, e.g. the Office 365 platform. There were a lot of good improvements for administrators of tenants of different parts of Office 365, including SharePoint.

We implemented SharePoint through our in-house team, because we are a technology company, so we didn't need to use external experts or specialists for the deployment of the platform.

I'm using SharePoint as part of Office 365, using it as a part of Teams and under the hood of Teams, so yes, I'm still using SharePoint.

SharePoint is deployed on public cloud. We have some projects where SharePoint 2019 is deployed as a server, but those are based on an integrations app, but mostly it's on Office 365, e.g. SharePoint Online. Microsoft is the cloud provider we're using for the platform.

I want to highlight that some organic growth was missed with Teams, because there's still complicated switching between tenants, e.g. Teams and SharePoint users. In this case, Teams users may work in different organizations, or are guests of different tenants and different organizations. Switching between tenants, or the ability to streamline and organize identity management logging into the system, e.g. to the cloud, to Office 365 with one ID or organization ID should provide options to do work with many organizations at the same time.

Currently, there is still the need to switch from one organization to another, to get the full toolsets of a particular tenant, so for users, that's quite annoying. For one organization that fits, and that works fine for an organization with guest users, but when we have multi-tenant situations, when people are collaborating on different projects, and when initiated or hosted by different organizations, switching from one organization to another should be improved.

We have 40 to 50 users of SharePoint, and they are involved in various projects run by customers. We also add users from other organizations, so the total collaboration space may include 200 to 300 users.

My advice to people thinking about using SharePoint, the very important lessons I learned during years of using the tool, is for them not to fight with it, e.g. they should not start to use it based on what they initially wished to use it for. It's best to first spend more time in getting a better understanding of the tool and its relevant capabilities. Learn SharePoint first. Spend time learning it.

I would give SharePoint a rating of nine out of ten.

Public Cloud

Other

I use this solution for storing documents. It is a single sign-on with the identity system and so it will sign me on and I will upload, download some document, and share it with my colleagues at work.

It has helped us with storing all the documents, which means that people are not going to intervene. There is a way of extracting knowledge within documentation and tracking it. There are knowledge assets for where documentation is stored, indexed, and searchable through SharePoint. I think this represents the collective knowledge, which is highly valuable.

Search can be improved a lot because we are always trying to compare it with Google Search. Beyond that, it would be helpful to tag the documents.

It is stable.

I was not personally involved with the setup. My IT team did this.

When I am choosing a product, I think of the quality of service, economy of sale, licensing, implementation, the skill set of documentation, SaaS availability, and skill set. These are the constellations in mind when I'm choosing a product.

I think SharePoint can definitely look at taking it to the next level of customer experience. It's not about how jazzy it looks and so on but it's more of how intuitive it is and how it can basically enable a user-friendly experience. When downloading a document, ask yourself how can you enable it? How can you enable some kind of a decision tree, and how can you have some kind of a bot in there which can do some assistance for the customer who was supposedly struggling to find the document, or is not able to find what to search. The bot can intervene and help the user with some alternate keywords and to clearly define what the user is looking for. Those kinds of things should be the next addition to SharePoint.