SharePoint Reviews

When an organization is using Microsoft products already, the integration with the Microsoft Office products and the ability to leverage web-based Office products can transform business processes. I think there is a great benefit in integrating collaboration, e-mail, document management, workflow, and content management in one product. When I have been in the role of Information Architect, I took advantage of site content, metadata, advanced searches (FAST), web parts and the free applications.

There are a large number of solid third-party vendors that develop web apps that are easy to integrate and configure.

In smaller organizations or organizations with limited budgets, I was able to leverage SharePoint to provide a lot of functionality around workflows, content and document management with very limited customized development.

When implemented correctly, SharePoint and Office 365 can provide knowledge workers with the information they need quickly and it can provide for team collaboration. I have used it to transform relationships between business units and to break down silos.

I would focus on improving:

• Integration with other enterprise products.
• Simpler API.
• Enhanced ability to report against structured and unstructured data in the environment.
• More flexible security or training: I have noticed in organizations I joined that they lock down SharePoint so much, there is very limited functionality. As a result, teams in the same organization move to other collaboration tools when they would not need to.
• Enhanced ability for users to back up and restore at various levels of the architecture.
• Have SharePoint and Office 365 expand so that additional third-party products for document management are not necessary.

I have used it for over 10 years.

Any issues regarding stability are generally caused by a lack of governance from planning of the underlying infrastructure through ongoing operations. With best practices in rolling out any application from an infrastructure planning and operations perspective, stability is not a significant issue.

Frankly, I would make a case for many organizations to go with the SaaS-based option. I investigated the security around Office 365 in the past and it was HIPAA and PSI compliant. When organizations host these types of solutions instead of leveraging commodity hardware and expertise in a SAAS environment, that is where the issues of stability and scalability come up.

Technical support is excellent.

I have used Google and still do today. It is less expensive as a personal solution to document management, archiving and collaboration. It also integrates with my personal Google e-mail solution.

Rolling out the enterprise version and ensuring integration with other products, budgeting for the hardware, and ensuring governance was not easy for SharePoint. However, I did leverage all of the plans and checklists that Microsoft provided, which made the process much simpler.

Office 365 was very simple to setup and I liked the ease of expanding storage when needed.

It really depends on the size of the organization. For small organizations, I would advise them on just purchasing Office 365 for what they need in the next year or two. They can always scale up. In larger organizations, I would love to have the enterprise version. However, not every organization can afford the cost.

I compared it against Google's solution.

I would advise others looking into implementing this product to consider Office 365 as a SaaS solution. I would also provide a governance plan and some common templates and training to get them started.

I would advise them to start with the teams that will leverage the product.

I would recommend finding ways to combine business process re-engineering with rolling out sites. This would be an easy win: combining process improvement with content management, document management, workflow and collaboration.

I would tell them to expect some amount of customization depending on what they wanted to leverage the product for.

As a portal, EDM platform for organizations, I think it is an excellent product. The limitations I have seen are the implementation and expectations of the technology, not the technology itself.

• DMS
• ECM
• Collaboration
• Portals
• Search
• BI
• Mobile support
• Business process management
• LOB integration

Global accessibility over O365 increased the collaboration within the organization.

I have used it for more than 11 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues, as such.

There were scalability issues with SP 2013, but MS made some improvements in SP 2016.

Technical support from MS is great, especially in the cloud area.

We were previously using a custom solution that was hard to maintain and there was also lack of user adoption. With SP, we were able to see great improvement in those areas.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Go for O365 plans that have different pricing as per business needs.

From the beginning, I was in favour of SharePoint. However, for customers, we have evaluated solutions such as Liferay, Sitecore, Drupal, etc.

For enterprise global collaboration, DMS, and ECM needs, this is the right platform.

Collaboration & DMS are the most valuable features of the product, to me.

It is also easy to use and provides valuable integration options.

We are a service provider of SharePoint and SCOM to our clients. And we can see the change, how efficiently they are able to carry out their regular productivity works through SP, while the IT team is able to have control and adapt quickly with SCOM.

There are multiple areas with room for improvement:

1. Scanning engine driver
2. Mobile integration (just launched by MS, yet to be seen)
3. Stability

We recommend this product with the following two main points:

1. Cost of investment is quite low, while the ROI is quite high.
2. Plan a proper approach, and look for a capable team for implementation

For SharePoint 2013:

• My Sites
• News-feed
• Discussions
• Communities

The Office 365 version shows real promise, although the mobile use of Discussions does not work as expected. Newsfeed does though. Not sure about Communities.

It's providing a social collaboration experience to a culture of heavy email users. They are not used to interacting on our intranet or other internal environments, having a profile to provide others more info about themselves, or searching for experts, information, etc. This is a helpful step to evolve the culture to be more digitally collaborative.

• The linkage between items, such as the blog. It does not integrate into communities or team sites, it's totally separate in its own environment. Tags and @mentions are not connected to them either. They feel very disconnected. Our leaders would like to use blogs but since they aren't connected to anything else they aren't a great solution.
• We are on premise so the mobile experience is also very lacking since users need to use a VPN on their device in order to utilize things.
• There aren't any metrics provided out of the box. I have to ask for just the number of new users each month and it takes days. There should be more data that we can use available to us as admins.

I've used for six to nine months.

We migrated from another company and moved from SP2010 to 2013 during the same time. There were a lot of hurdles, and people have profile problems (most of those issues have not fully migrated).

Stability, even after deployment three months ago, still seems to be an issue. Tagging does not always show up in trending hashtags immediately. When tagging and @mentions work is not consistent from place to place.

We are on two farms so it is not a truly global solution which is frustrating when trying to communicate about global programs and events. Those in the Europe farm cannot follow the majority of our content in the North American farm.

Our SharePoint 2013 platform is hosted at HP and they manage services for us. HP support is getting better just as of the past few weeks. They do not seem to have a great handle on SP2013 social however.

HP has not been great but we've really brought the issues to light over the past few weeks so they are stepping up their game.

This is the first time using it at this company.

IT was not very transparent about providing what the tools can and cannot do. As a user, I had to figure it all out, ask a lot of questions then get them to explain why or why not we could or could not do certain things.

HP does not seem very knowledgeable about SP2013 social.

I believe IT looked at Yammer but felt our culture could just use SP2013 for free first to get our feet wet before investing in another tool. There are no business requirements for an Enterprise Social Network yet so with the pitfalls of using SP2013 out of the box, we are seeing what we actually need vs. what we have.

Perform a controlled pilot first with social advocates in the company first. Nail down the business requirements with management before rolling anything out. Get their buy-in and support. Once that is decided, pilot several other tools to see what else is out there. Yammer isn't the only other solution for SharePoint. Compare costs, etc, select a solution, create a social governance team, train them well, provide guidance templates if needed and create regular training or webinars for people to get on board. Have leaders use the tool to communicate and move away from email.

• We can access SharePoint from a DMZ.
• Vendors and other outside parties can work with it easily.

Prior to implementing SharePoint, we accessed our network just via the internet. However in 2013, we implemented it. With accessibility from a DMZ, SharePoint is a good solution for outside access.

It tends to be unstable and slow when accessing different features.

I've used it since 2013.

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• Office integration
• Collaboration
• Discussions
• Shared documents
• MS Dynamics integration
• Tasks
• Schedule project integration
• Subscriptions

It's allowed automatic distribution of technical updates to shop floor technicians in the FABs.

• Cloud and Office 365 integration with Outlook could be more stable, and an external company collaborator’s connections can be iffy.
• Custom site provisioning and management
• Migration from On-Premise to the Cloud has no automation tools to help in migrating the enterprise content, and so this requires throttling the bandwidth to guard against attack.
• New application models are too complex - in Office365 you are sharing the whole SP farm with all Microsoft customers in a region so fixes take too long.
• Deploying apps in some cases have limitations because you have no access to the admin console.

I've been using SharePoint since its initial release, including Office365, On-Line 2013, and On-Premise 2013. In total, it's been 15 years, and I was involved in the initial SharePoint Pilot test.

Getting customers to see it as the de facto repository for collaboration data takes serious investment in training and executive backing. Upgrades and migration are challenging.

Occasional Office365 SharePoint outages have been noted.

No issues encountered.

It's poor, and if you want Microsoft support on SharePoint you have to hire Microsoft Consulting Services.

It's poor, and if you want Microsoft support on SharePoint you have to hire Microsoft Consulting Services.

We used various methods to achieve the same results shared folders and third party document management solutions, e.g. Documentum.

It's complex because you must spend significant time determining roles and train accordingly, or else it becomes an unstructured dumping ground for everyone’s files.

I've done it both ways, and Microsoft Consulting Services is well equipped to properly implement SharePoint.

It's very high, I can't disclose exact figures, but it's a seven-figure number.

Use enterprise pricing as a part of Office 365.

No other options were evaluated.

Budget enough design and training dollars to seed your enterprise with certified electronic workers that can provide thought leadership, mentoring and set standards for use.

The best feature that I found for SharePoint was having a main point of contact for everyone involved. Whether it be for the entire company or it for a specific department, this has made it easy to create a common place.

When I took over SharePoint 2007, it was fairly basic in its execution. It had sections for the various departments, but it wasn't common for users to actually use it. I ended up creating various lists and libraries to begin pulling processes into the system. It was fairly shoe horned, but it did the job.

In addition to this, without the use of an extension, I began using SharePoint to do more collaborative tasks and projects. There are extensions for SharePoint to increase its functionality, but using task management, was able to create sites and manage projects in that way.

SharePoint is extremely bare bones when purchased. To really bring it into a functional state, it will require decent configuration and extensions for what you need. It comes with the basics like site creation, lists, libraries, and things of this nature. However, if you need more functionality, you will need to either go to Microsoft for those additional functionalities or to a 3rd party that provides it. This is where the cost for SharePoint balloons.

Depending on the version, there are server requirements so if you're not up-to-date on software, this will also increase the price of the service. For the functionality you get at this price point, it leaves a lot to be desired.

3 years

Sharepoint was deployed prior to me coming on-board so I'm not familiar with it.

For the most part, SharePoint was stable based upon the set up that we have. When installing the R2 update, it did end up creating issues with the .NET code and eliminated some of the extensions. For example, the Excel extension that is used to view Excel spreadsheets within SharePoint was either damaged or deleted. This has caused issues with exporting to and from SharePoint and hasn't been corrected.

SharePoint is tied to Microsoft's CAL pricing model so depending on your agreement, can be in line or balloon the cost. This is primarily for an on-site solution. If you're using the cloud solution, then it's still on a per user basis, but may/may not be a better fit. Our company didn't have any issues with scaling within the existing software version, however, if we were to upgrade to newer version, it would require a sizable investment.

Microsoft doesn't offer support for SharePoint unless you purchase the option. There are also 3rd party solutions for this. Support for SharePoint is minimal at best on its own. You will need support so your best bet is to purchase some type of support package through the vendor you purchase it from.

See the customer service section above.

N/A. SharePoint was the original solution.

I wasn't with the company during the procurement and deployment phases.

Our solution was done in-house.

Unknown.

This will vary greatly depending on your CAL agreement with Microsoft and what vendor you purchase options from.

SharePoint is a good solution and is very flexible if you're willing to invest the time and money into it. It requires full buy-in from various departments within a company and will require heavy configuration to get it to where it typically needs to be for your needs. I personally wouldn't go with SharePoint again as it doesn't fit my needs and is currently being used, but in very limited fashion.