SharePoint Reviews

• Enhanced communications
• The ability to set up sites to share data/information in a one-stop shopping method. Including:

  
  

  • User-friendly interface to share files
  • Ability to have calendaring specific to the function/department addressed by the site
  • The important links facility, which provides easy access to frequently used items
  • Workflow, which allows us to define processes and make it easier for the user to perform a task. The workflow provides a consistent framework for performing the task, as well as providing behind-the-scenes flow, thus removing the manual process of determining where the flow goes next. This also removes the human error portion of that flow.

As the employees are spread around the country and the world, this allows us to communicate more effectively by providing an easier interface with the information (files, calendars, links and news) all in one spot. It allows us to collaborate more effectively as people can access this information according to their time availability. The one-stop shopping is critical, as everyone is looking at one version of the truth and therefore are on the same page.

This product has allowed us to coordinate the efforts of individual groups, as well as different groups that need to interact for specific projects/processes. Before this, there was a lot of emails being exchanged and certainly there were times that some of the people that needed to know where inadvertently left off of an email or two.

Not so much an improvement as a caveat: Due to the flexibility and power of the product, out of the box it can be daunting to use. Without some consulting work from a SharePoint expert, the product would not be quite as user friendly.

I have used it for two years.

At first, we encountered stability issues, but they have been ironed out and – knock on wood – we have been stable for a while. I believe our issue might have been related to sizing the resources properly, as we started small with the intention of growing as we developed more uses for the product.

At the end of the day, I would say we have not encountered any scalability issues. We have added more sites and continue to add them as people realize the power and effectiveness of the product. There are times, though relatively infrequent, where it seems to bog down a little but it does not have a major impact on productivity.

I believe most of our external support comes from a consultant and from a user point of view, I am satisfied as I have yet to have a question/issue that could not be resolved and I have not had many questions or issues.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Here again, from a user’s view, I would say initial setup was complex as to obtain the most benefit, you needed to understand what you were looking for and how best to fit it into the scheme of SharePoint. It seemed that there was often more than one way to solve the need and trying to map the need with the best approach took some time.

I am unable to comment as I am not involved with the details of this.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We chose SharePoint as we had business partners that were already using it, we had exposure to the product that way and liked what we saw.

Make sure you find the right consultant.

Make sure you invest the proper amount of time to plan the implementation. This is not something like Excel, where you can install, train and use. To get the most out of it, you need a game plan for what you will use it for and how to design/customize it to your needs.

Integration with LDAP is valuable because:

• Access to all files is secured and controlled via the roles & permissions that are sitting in LDAP for each user. This saves time and effort in determining who should have access to what, how and where.
• Access level in terms of editing capabilities can be controlled easily, too.
• Advanced reporting: Tracking who accessed what, how and when, recording the details, including all successful access and all denied attempts.
• Made multiple-factor authentication possible· Password synchronization, password recovery, SSO (single sign-on)

It provides a common place to communicate and collaborate, common repository of documents, etc.

• Data and use analysis
• Load balancing
• Common theme
• Better editing tools: The editing tools are still not up to par with all the existing hi-tech & GUI editing tools:
  
  • To name a few: Real-time trapping, dynamic previews, auto-theme regeneration, animation features, 3D features, color grading & saturation, real-time snapshot replication & deduplication, multi-platform and software language adoptability, file-level security & encryption feature, content security capability
  • Hardware Limitations: Responsiveness to multi-gesture input devices (similar to the ones used in the Iron Man movies or the Minority Report), robotic assistance (thumb print, eye retina scan, voice recognition, etc.)
  • WCAG: auto-accessibility compliance capability & assistance

I have seen bits & pieces of these features from different software companies, but none have actually put them all together, yet.

One day – someday – with the fast developments in technology, the best is still to come.

I have used it for 14+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; very reliable.

I have encountered scalability issues, but only due to a physical server. With virtual server architecture, this can be resolved easily.

From Microsoft, technical support is very good – but rarely needed.

I previously used a different solution; switched because of ease of use and deployment.

Initial setup was straightforward; some steps are implied for an experienced IT tech.

We got this through the California Foundation for Community Colleges; a four-site license.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated an in-house solution.

Go for it. It works.

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.