SharePoint Reviews

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 Now, these reports have been replaced by a dashboard which is maintained on a daily basis.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.

• 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.