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.

The valuable features are its integration with:

• The Office 365 ecosystem
• Other Office 365 services
• The Office application suite

We haven't rolled out Sharepoint online to the entire organization. However, we have been using it on a small scale within our IT function.

It has brought on improvements due to:

• Ability to easily share documents which reduces the instances of documents being emailed around.
• Accessibility from mobile devices which complements the file sharing capability very well.

I would like to see improvements in the interface. There is a somewhat convoluted way to change lists, columns, and even the site landing page.

Being new to Sharepoint, it wasn't obvious how to do things and where one actually starts. The recent Microsoft interface improvements are good.

We have been using this solution for sixteen months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We are using a different on-premise platform. The plan is to migrate to Sharepoint online for our document management and business process applications.

We are switching in order to:

• Migrate to a cloud platform
• Maximize our investment in the Office 365 platform
• Consolidate platforms
• Provide a more accessible, standardized, and integrated platform for our users.

The initial configuration was straightforward. The online support documentation is well written and easy to follow.

First understand the scale of what this product offers.

Don't hesitate to engage with a partner to provide best practice advice if you don't have the in-house skills or knowledge.

Ensure you understand what governance and compliance requirements your organization has to which you need to align the platform.

Have a plan on how you are going to structure the site collections and hierarchy.

Lists, documents, wiki pages and being able to create sites/subsites are valuable features.

The fact that our operational process improvement initiatives continue to be assigned on a lower priority in our portfolio management, it has given rise to the use of SharePoint as a platform to run its day-to-day operational processes. Specifically, we moved away from using MS OneNote.

It has its limitations. We are unable to use this tool to "archive" data and run queries to generate hindsight information.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I did experience some scalability issues; this could be more because of trying to use SharePoint as a BI tool, which it is not designed for.

As it is internal, there is some knowledge that they are unaware of which makes it necessary for me to go check with third party sites (such as wikis) for answers.

Initially, we were MS OneNote.

All I did was request for a site to be created and then the rest of the configuration was up to me.

I am not involved with the purchasing decisions.

There are some features that I am looking for and that I am unable to find, for example creating nested IF functions.

Document libraries
Team sites
Workflow engine

Improved collaboration through multi-user document editing capabilities. Improved governance through process workflows.

The product could be more intuitive both from an administrative point of view and from an end user point of view.

I have been using this for five years.

We did not have any stability issues.

We did not have any scalability issues. However, we have deployed a very simple system, with no bespoke tooling or plugins. We have, as yet, not had to scale the solution beyond adding more RAM or disc to either the database or application server.

Never had to use technical support from Microsoft for this product.

We did not have a previous solution.

Setup was complex. Setting up the solution requires a solid understanding of the various architecture options available. While Microsoft has made significant improvements in changing the deployment method so that it is much more guided, decisions taken at the time of deployment can have long lasting detrimental impacts if the decision is not well understood.

We evaluated Atlassian Confluence (we use both products in house for different things).

Plan thoroughly and well for your deployment and make sure that you understanding the implications of the decisions you make around multi-server implementations for scalability and resilience.

• Visual web parts
• Document libraries
• FBA
• Document templates

It simplifies development of portal and document management. Also, by using Office 365, we got good integration with office tools.

When we develop portals, we need to develop a lot of web parts that eventually go to a number of pages. These pages must be created manually. There should be some easy way to develop pages automatically via programing.

I am working on SharePoint since 2011. I have worked (with my team) on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and 2013. We have developed enterprise web portals of government entities and large private organizations.

We have not had any stability issues.

Actually, the scaling is very simple. One of my customers needs their portal in three languages (English, Arabic and Urdu). SharePoint doesn’t have the Urdu language package, hence we had to work hard for it.

Most of time we got support from forum and that is good enough.

We did not use a previous solution.

Setup was simple.

I recommend using Office 365.

We did not look at other solutions.

if you have a .NET team, the SharePoint is right solution for you.

Some valuable features are:

• The SharePoint document management is second to none. This was one of our main reasons to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to 2013.
• SharePoint 2013 had a better and cleaner user interface that has appealed to more users.
• The improved out-of-the-box Search functionality, was also a driving factor in migrating to SharePoint 2013.

With the cleaner and friendlier user interface, we have managed to assign access requests back to the users. While our support desk dealt with these requests previously, we have now managed to easily train managers in each team/department to provide access requests easily, thus reducing the load on our support desk.

The areas in which this product can improve are:

• The user experience can be simplified a bit more.
• The performance and customizability can also be improved.

I have used this product for 12 months.

There were no major stability issues as such, but the user profile service stopped unexpectedly on a few occasions.

No issues were experienced in regards to the scalability.

Being a Microsoft product that is widely used around the world, the technical support is easily available.

The only problem is when there is any customization done to the default SharePoint tool.

We used the older version, Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Our reason to upgrade was Microsoft decided to stop its support for SharePoint 2010 aand also because our license was soon going to expire.

For someone who had not set up SharePoint previously, the initial setup was somewhat complicating. However, it became very straightforward thereafter.

The pricing and licensing is one of the most crucial parts of using Microsoft SharePoint.

Confluence by Atlassian was the only other option that was considered.

In the end, we chose the Microsoft SharePoint solution because we have a Microsoft Gold membership; so the pricing and licensing was greatly reduced for us.

Try and stick to a vanilla installation/setup as much as possible. When branding your instance of SharePoint, also try not to implement too much of custom codes. The more custom codes you implement, the less maintainable and less migratable SharePoint becomes.

The collaborative features, the central repository for project documents and the know-how for standard/best practices are valuable.

It has:

• Improved the exchange of knowledge from team to team.
• Provided better product support through the centralized documentation of procedures.
• Assisted in how-to to fix production issues.

The integration of Office document editing and publishing with the wiki component that we use for creating our how-to section needs to improve. At the very least there should be an easy way to integrate images into the wiki through the drag and drop option.

We also have many other tools that create their documentation in the form of HTML pages, sometimes with hundreds of pages. We should be able to directly integrate those into our site, not just through a link but to truly integrate this content as if it was native.

I have used this solution for four years.

The only issue that we have is when we are creating a new site from templates. During such a situation, many of the sub-components do not work or have to be completely reconfigured once created. This makes the creation of a new project based on our project site template very painful.

There were no scalability issues but then again, we are only about 30 people who are using it constantly.

The technical support level is practically nil.

We did not have anything before.

The initial setup was not so complex but our attempt to migrate was plagued with some issue and it was ultimately abandoned. It was not worth redoing everything what was there .

For us, in terms of the project development and support tools and for a collaborative repository of live documents, there is nothing like this solution.

We did evaluate a few other options. I know we looked at Jostle which we did adopt for the social-side of our intranet and for the publishing of static articles.

What is costly with SharePoint is the customization and maintenance of these custom components.

Unless you are a .NET development shop or are thinking about hiring a SharePoint person on staff full-time, you need to stay close to the out-of-the-box config.

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.