SharePoint Reviews

We internally use SharePoint for all of our document management, and we integrate that with D365. We use CRM and SharePoint to manage our sales pipeline and all documentation related to Sales and subsequent projects are stored on SharePoint. We use the Power platform for certain workflows, for example, approvals of Business Proposals. 

We have created our own custom modules within D365 for our project billing. 

SharePoint allows us to manage the full lifecycle of documents within our organization. 

I do like the collaboration around documents. The versioning history has proven useful in some instances as well. 

It's also very easy to use. I like the fact that we can integrate with various other applications.

For my role, it personally covers all my requirements. 

I've been using this solution for about twenty years. we have always used the latest version of SharePoint, as well as CRM, which is now D365.

I haven't had any issues around that. It's all very stable once it's deployed.

Based on things I've heard, I'd rate it a six out of ten. Just from the feedback I've had from developers working with SharePoint Designer, they do feel that there are some limitations. For SharePoint, most of our clients are medium-sized organizations.

We do most of the support for our clients, but I do know that on very odd occasions, which was a few years ago and doesn't happen as much nowadays because it is more stable, when we have logged support calls with Microsoft, they have always been great. Over the last few years, their support has certainly improved from 14 years ago when support was difficult. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

I wasn't involved in its deployment, but I can think back to projects that we have done with SharePoint with customers. Obviously, the project itself will be dependent on how many customizations they need, but they are generally not very long projects. We have had some that are done in two to three weeks including customization and deploying everything. It isn't a difficult deployment process from my experience.

It's a good buy for small to medium businesses that are looking for a basic document management solution. If you have a Microsoft environment, you obviously got the benefit of it natively integrating with the whole Office suite. It's quite easy to integrate with other applications as well, but if you're looking for something more scalable and robust, you may want to investigate other products before making that choice.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

I have been using SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online.

We use SharePoint Online for document management.

The most valuable features of SharePoint Online are content management, document management, and approval processes. Additionally, there are a number of features that provide integration with multiple Office services and external services.

SharePoint Online could improve the user interface and when modifying any of the user interfaces can be challenging. Additionally, there are challenges with the detail in the analytics user interface and the overall customization could improve. 

In the next release of the solution, they need to fix the user interface. It is not user-friendly for a generic user. It should be easier because in some of the applications it's quite easy to assign the permission, you only need to use the right click of the mouse and select the permission that we need to assign. However, in SharePoint, it's a bit complex.

I have been using SharePoint Online for approximately six years.

SharePoint Online is stable. We are using the out-of-box options only, and it has been stable.

The scalability of SharePoint Online is good.

We have opened Microsoft support tickets. The learning materials are good for all the solutions from Microsoft, they have multiple videos and documentation available.

The initial setup of SharePoint Online was straightforward.

For a general user, the documentation could improve. The assigning of unique permissions can be difficult for a beginner.

We have joint support for the applications and the SharePoint Online version, Microsoft is managing everything from the cloud and we are supporting it at the application level. There are not many resources that are required for their support and maintenance.

The licensing model for SharePoint Online is based on per user, and it is monthly. The price of the solution overall is good.

There can be additional costs depending on the features that we are going to use. If we are using any third-party integration or third-party connector, then in this scenario we need premium licensing.

My advice is SharePoint Online is good, but Microsoft does not recommend doing a lot of customization management. It is a good document manager, and content management system if they are using the out-of-the-box approach only. The out-of-the-box options are very good, but if we try to customize it a lot, then it's not recommended.

I rate SharePoint Online seven out of ten.

SharePoint allows us to access and to search for what we have in our repositories.

What I like about SharePoint is that they keep up with a lot of updates, and they bring out new features. I also like that the system is integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of apps.

Document management and the ability to easily integrate single sign-on (SSO) are areas for improvement in SharePoint.

Integrating SharePoint with other software is what I'd like to see in its next release.

I've used SharePoint in the last 12 months. We use it internally in our organization.

The stability of SharePoint needs improvement, because once you start to get a large amount of data, it becomes very unwieldy, and it takes a long time to index. There are much better products for content management and knowledge management, when compared to SharePoint.

SharePoint is not as scalable, particularly when implementing larger projects. It's good for small-scale implementation.

I haven't personally contacted the technical support for SharePoint. It's our support team who contacts them.

I used HPE Content Manager, formerly TRIM software, which used to be owned by TRIM here in Australia. We used TRIM a lot, then it was bought out by HPE, HPE has now been bought out by Microsoft.

Our organization chose SharePoint because they wanted to become accredited with Microsoft. They saw that Microsoft was the industry leader, so everyone wanted Microsoft. They saw Microsoft as the way forward, at the time.

The initial setup for SharePoint was complex. Anything from Microsoft is complex.

We implemented SharePoint in-house. We had a team that had experience with SharePoint when we decided to use it as our content management system. We had the skills from implementation and from attending numerous Microsoft training courses.

SharePoint is probably cheaper than dedicated, larger, and more useful content management systems, so you could get a return on investment from it, as long as you keep your infrastructure and everything up to date, and move to the new version when you have to.

You have to pay for a license to use SharePoint, and any extended support from Microsoft is expensive. For example: if you have SharePoint 2013 and it reaches its end of life and goes out of support, you can migrate to SharePoint online, and that's a benefit, but you'll have to pay for extended support.

I evaluated Lotus Notes and HPE Content Manager.

In terms of what features I found valuable in SharePoint, I haven't found many. I had come from IBM and was very entrenched with Lotus Notes and the Lotus Notes environment. I love Lotus Notes. When IBM sold Lotus, we started to move away from Notes, and I didn't like it, and then I was made redundant. Now I've been outside of IBM, having to use Microsoft, and I hate it.

My advice to people looking into using SharePoint for the first time is for them to 
look at how much data they have, and also look at the volume their data and data holdings are going to grow to. They should look at how long it would take to get to that point, then look at their ROI, and whether they would need to upgrade to another product in the near future. I'd say "Yes. Go for it.", but they should also look at the future, and how it would be long term.

I'm rating SharePoint a seven. Yes, it's good for organizations to start on knowledge management, but you'd have to look at how quickly you think your data will grow, and how soon it would take to get to that point, because it can become unwieldy.

Our company is a consulting partner of Microsoft. We're a service integrator that works in both the private and Australian Federal Government sectors.

It is an eDMS. We use it for electronic document management.

The security feature is valuable. We have control over who has access to what and when. We also have the audit trails to review who accessed what at what time. The document versioning is also a valuable feature. We can have multiple versions of the same document. If there is an issue or if there's something that we missed on a document, we can easily roll back to the previous version and get our data the way it was.

The product must provide more automation. We must be able to automate tasks instead of doing them manually. The product must enable customization of features. It must allow integration with other systems. Integrating the tool into databases like Oracle or Microsoft SQL and pulling data from SharePoint would be helpful.

I have been using the solution for close to five years.

I am satisfied with the tool’s stability. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We have eight users in our organization.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. It is a cloud solution. A person with some knowledge about the solution can deploy it in four to five hours. One person can do the deployment.

The product is reasonably priced.

I will recommend the solution to others because of its security features. Security is key for any organization. The tool is very scalable and stable. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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.

We just started using it. We use it for collaborating and sharing documents and files internally and externally. We also create sites for each department, and we also create directories. It's basically for collaboration and sharing files. If we need to send something to the entire organization, we send it to SharePoint. So, everybody has access to it.

It allowed us to be more productive in terms of being more organized. Everyone seems to think the organizational thing is the best part of it.

For SharePoint, I believe the most valuable feature is the customization and allowing you to share and edit files and documents. Being able to share externally and the precise administration of the files in terms of giving permissions and controlling who has access to what is a very good feature.

It has worked very well for me. It seems like they've improved everything. I don't have any cons about it as such, but I don't think they have a talk-to-text, speech-to-text, or speech-to-type. That would be cool for accessibility.

I have been using this solution for the past five years. This is a new organization, and in this organization, we've been using it for the past month.

It is very stable. I haven't had any outages or any issues.

Its scalability is very good. We can add as many users as we want. It is designed for high scalability.

We have about 12 employees. We have two HR people, two marketing people, one chief product officer, the CEO, and the head of technology. So, it is a mixture of different departments. It is not that expensive. Right now, it is only $5 per user per month. So, we are definitely going to grow.

Anytime I had a technical issue, their technical support has been pretty good. I haven't had too many technical issues though, but if I do, I just research it.

We've always used Microsoft here, so we didn't use any other solution.

It was straightforward. We have 12 employees, so it didn't take long at all. 

It was basically just giving them a computer and them signing into their accounts. It is included actually in our subscription, so we didn't have to install or do anything. It was there. I, as the IT manager, did have to create the site though and then add the members of the groups and stuff like that.

I did it myself. For its deployment and maintenance, only one person is required. I take care of its deployment and maintenance.

We haven't even been open for a month yet, so we have not really got an ROI.

It is pretty reasonable. It is $5 per month per user. We have 12 users now, so it is about $60 per month.  

There are no additional costs.

From my past experience with Microsoft, I didn't have to evaluate other options.

I would say definitely go with it. I haven't had any issues with it for years, so go with it. SharePoint has always been good. Microsoft has always been great.

I'll rate it a 10 out of 10.

We work with the on-premise version of this product at our client's site. The solution is used in specific industries like banks and insurance companies where a local solution is needed to satisfy document storing requirements. 

The organization where the sharepoint solutions are deployed have benefited immensely in terms of the document managment system requirements. Storing all their digital assets in document format. Scanned documents and later use it for reference and legal and regulatory requirements.

Other features being the collaboration, web content management, workflows, analytics available within the product has helped the organization in not going in for separate products. Cost is a big factor when it comes to IT implementations and products usage.

SharePoint has many good features. You can store files of any type, whether office-related documents, videos or MP4 recordings. Metadata can also be stored which makes searching, categorizing and grouping of documents easier. At the same time, the database doesn't take a huge amount of space because documents are on a storage device, unlike other solutions. You can also create forms, have workflows, approvals, scan and upload documents. The solution also has OCR capabilities which are key for the banking and insurance industries. It also has a good forms feature and approval. The DocuWare archive fits very well with that. The solution is cost-effective and has a perpetual license per environment. The product fits neatly within small and medium enterprise banks. It's very cost-effective.

The solution lacks collaboration features so that I am unable to collaboratively create and work on a document with others. The second element that is lacking is compliance or records management so that certain documents, of a legal nature, for example, are only accessible to certain users. I would really like to see that kind of feature.

From a compliance perspective like GDPR  and if the document or data contains personally identifiable data PII data, the SharePoint feature for records management should allow to identify the data being PII data and also provide feature for GDPR wherein the customer is asked for confirmation if needs to be stored and how the data and documents will be used and for what purpose.

If the customer does not confirm should not allow storage of documents and data that contains personal information should not be stored without customers consent. It should allow for archiving feature post the period for which the customer has given the consent for the data and document to be stored  is over should allow to delete the data and document.

Looking for GDPR and other compliance features built into the product as a workflow

I've been using this solution for 21 years. From its 1st version in 2001 till date. We have moved to the cloud version and offering of SharePoint i.e. 0365/SharePoint Online as well.

For a company like ours with around 25,000 users, this product is good and quite stable. We need to explore what happens when the data increases beyond 1 million or 10 million records. At that point, we may need to look again at scalability and what the product can support. They have support for vertical or horizontal scaling. They have a feature where you can increase server hardware, but that needs to be checked. We have two people assisting with maintenance. 

The solution has a good ability to scale up in terms of number of documents and number of users.

Microsoft has the best customer service and support both on web, online, on calls, emails and if you are one of those partners it becomes all the way easy to get the support needed.

Some of our client were first time users of SharePoint so going from no prior system for document storage, collaboration, content management, workflows, application development platform was a boon.

For all of our client who have moved from one version to another version of the product, they always found the product improved in terms of features and functionality and performance.

They have good documentation for deployment so it was quite straightforward. I was involved along with the vendor, setting up the environment, setting up the product, the infrastructure and configuration. We had some minor issues but deployment was quite seamless. It took two or three hours, we had one infrastructure and one technical person working on it, that was enough for us. 

This was implemented using Vendor as well as an in-house team with the client. A kind of hybrid development team created for application development, product deployment and configuration.

I should say if an organization has decided to go for the flagship Microsoft product i.e. Sharepoint, then they should start thinking ahead and plan a roadmap of moving their department applications to Sharepoint and also use the other pillars/features to their advantage the ROI and TCO will be shorten and the organization will gain immensely from early usage of the product for all their development needs.

The license is a one-time cost when you purchase the solution, but there is an annual support fee.

I have worked with products similar to SharePoint such as Documentum, and others. They are heavily loaded with a lot of features, which small and medium enterprise banks, catering to anywhere up to 20,000 users, may not require. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.