SharePoint Reviews and Pricing

President at Prescient Digital Media

Aug 3, 2022

SharePoint for Intranets

SharePoint is appreciated for its simplicity of use out-of-the-box, though derided for problems (and the expenses) customizing the user experience (design, navigation and information architecture).

SharePoint is replete with functionality and applications, and is the most comprehensive intranet development platform on the market. It is, unfortunately, expensive, and most of the feature set that we use, and that our clients use, fall short of expectations, and often below best-of-breed. SharePoint isn’t a niche product that is supposed to be superb at web content management, or social networking; it’s a broad solution, one that has something for everybody; a solution that can please some, but not all.

SharePoint’s greatest strength is that it’s an all-in-one solution – it’s a portal, a content management system, a search engine, a social collaboration platform, a web development platform, and so much more. Its greatest weakness is that it’s an all-in-one solution – everything and the kitchen sink; a jack-of-all-trades, a master of none. Some argue that SharePoint is a “mile wide, but a foot deep.” It offers so much, but many features are seen as sub-par.

SharePoint is part enterprise content management (ECM) solution, part portal solution, part web development platform, part social media platform. It offers many, many solutions and functions – often too much for most organizations – but it is Microsoft’s hope that it will become everything to everybody including the de facto platform for the company intranet, website(s) and extranet(s). In sum total, it is an amazingly powerful solution, but often fails to live up to expectations.

SharePoint 2013 was a fair solution, with an abundance of time, patience… and money, it could work; SharePoint 2016, is even better, but still requires a lot of care, and investment.

The latest, SharePoint 2019 (and SharePoint Online in Office 365), further improves upon previous versions, notably the mobile experience and the user experience.

SharePoint has a new mobile app, so you can access your intranet using a phone app, instead of using the browser. Outside of the app, SharePoint has a new, clean mobile experience – greatly enhanced over the mobile experience in SharePoint 2016.

Another big, major improvement to SharePoint is the new user experience (UX) design and general usability of SharePoint. It is noticeably superior to previous versions of SP. It’s very clean and modern, with a major emphasis on images, and video.

“SharePoint 2019 has the most UX (improvements) than we’ve ever delivered before in a SharePoint release,” Hani Loza, of the Microsoft SharePoint team.

Among the new UX features, particularly noticeable in the new SharePoint Communications Sites, are drag-and-drop web parts for image galleries, slideshows, hero slideshow, and video.

Microsoft has released a new video function and portal, called Stream. Using Microsoft Stream, videos will play automatically in a page, and it includes auto transcription, face detection, and enhanced sharing and tagging. The Stream team say “audio transcriptions and face detection make finding relevant content easy—even for specific words or people shown on screen, whether in a single video or across all your company’s videos.”

From a governance perspective, SharePoint is good, when compared to other platforms. It is not perfect, but no solution is.

Like the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology agnostic; whether it’s SharePoint or another portal or content management platform, the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same. In short, governance lives and dies with its owners, and the rules they put in place, regardless of the technology. Governance is largely applicable to any technology platform and as such is generic to start.

When building a governance model for SharePoint, the major components should include:

The umbrella ownership model – Centralized? Decentralized? Collaborative?
Defined ownership structure (names and titles)
Roles and responsibilities (jobs and duties)
Decision making process (who is responsible for what and when)
Authorization (who is responsible for what and when)
Policy (what is allowed, and what is not allowed)

While governance is generic in nature, regardless of the software and hardware, there are some components of SharePoint that require specific consideration. Site Collections and Team Sites are so easy to deploy, and it is so easy for even the most neophyte web users to create a site (e.g. Team Sites, My Sites, Publishing Sites, etc.), SharePoint sites can easily grow at exponential rates and amount to tens-of-thousands in a short period of time. ‘Baking’ in rules and inheritance to site collections is critical to ensuring a consistent, uniform user experience.

These issues and others are discussed in-depth including, SharePoint governance, and some of the specific, requisite steps and policies for implementing intranet and in the SharePoint Governance white paper.

To learn about the specifics of intranet design with SharePoint, see the Intranet Design white paper.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user9216Head of Consulting & Solutions EMEA at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

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Oct 17, 2013

I would add education about what is governance and what needs to be governed.

Toby Ward

President at Prescient Digital Media

Apr 6, 2022

The SharePoint Intranet – Pros and Cons

SharePoint has conquered the enterprise intranet. Although the conquest is never as bloody nor expensive as more invasive conquests, such as the Mongols under Genghis Khan, intranet citizens are not always thrilled by the new system and structure under Gates Khan.

SharePoint is present in about 90% of the Fortune 100; and plays a prominent intranet role in about 70% of knowledge worker intranets (either powering the main intranet portal, or delivering associated collaboration sites and/or document repositories). This in spite of its history.

SharePoint 2007 was a dog; SharePoint 2010 was a dressed-up dog; but SharePoint 2013 represented a leap forward to a more user-friendly, true web platform. SharePoint 2016 saw improvements, but perhaps the most significant advances have come in the last couple of years with the release and evolution of SharePoint online (and eventually SharePoint 2019) with the advent of Office 365.

SharePoint Online, and the on-premises version SharePoint 2019 (though the Online version is constantly being updated and improved upon) represent considerable improvement to a a very usable, complex digital workplace solution. SharePoint Online Modern Experience has become a truly mobile friendly solution, with a number of improvements to collaboration (particularly Teams and a dedicated mobile app) and for hybrid cloud scenarios.

There are a lot of reasons to buy into or upgrade to Online or 2019: the latest iteration of Microsoft’s portal-web development platform represents a massive, multi-million dollar upgrade on the previous versions of SharePoint (a version that was typically oversold given its underwhelming if not frustrating performance and lack of execution). SharePoint Online and 2019 are massive upgrade from 2013: noticeable improvements to social computing (social networking via Delve and Teams), mobile computing (responsive design with "modern" pages and a dedicated mobile app), better Office integration, Teams, cloud and hybrid integration, search and more.

But it’s not all good news, and it’s not a solution that fits every organization.

Here at Prescient Digital Media, we upgraded move to SharePoint Online in Office 365 (which is more feature and functionally rich than SharePoint 2019). Though some problems persist, the bugs and challenges are not as persistent as versions 2013 and 2016. There are some obvious improvements (pros) and some persistent issues (cons):

Cloud – you no longer need to worry about patches, maintenance and security; Microsoft takes care of this for you
Mobile – enhanced mobile access experience with completely responsive sites and apps, and dedicated single sign-on apps for each of the tools in the Office 365 toolset
Social – enhanced social networking via Delve, Teams and Yammer
Web CMS – enhanced publishing and management interface (employing the ‘ribbon’ from Office)
Branding – the new "modern pages" are slick and responsive; it can be more challenging to implement new custom designs using the new modern pages versus classic, and MS has openly cautioned against customizing the home page
Search – search is much improved with the full integration with the FAST search engine, but requires some configuration work

There are far more pros than cons, but there should be at the price MS charges. SharePoint is very good for a small to medium-size intranet in a .NET environment that requires a web development platform focused on enterprise content management. In some scenarios, SharePoint can excel as a large enterprise intranet, but it can cause headaches if its overly customized .But it is not cheap, typically requires a lot of work and customization, and doesn’t always work as promised.

Speaking of conquest, the Chinese learned Mongol lessons the hard way, and built the Great Wall. Although a firewall is requisite with any intranet, not just a SharePoint intranet, walls kill collaboration and employee knowledge management. More salient, key lessons can be drawn from implementing and working with SharePoint:

Licensing represents a fraction of the cost
Planning and governance are mission critical – mission critical
Custom or third-party web parts and applications can really enhance the experience
Social collaboration doesn’t just happen, it’s earned
Change management is the key to success

For more information see the SharePoint For Communicators white paper, at www.PrescientDigital.com.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user635955Project Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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Mar 28, 2017

Scored quite high when we evaluated it on compliance and compatibility with required ECM features (Gartner ECM assessment criteria used in our assessment), i.e. scored in the range of 92% to 96%. Among the criteria evaluated were library services, record services, content creation and capture, metadata management, workflow and BPM, navigation and search, security and access control, and architecture and integration functionalities.

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Mordhi Alenazi

Business Application Development Manager at NWC

Jun 8, 2020

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Good collaboration and sharing but the workflow engine cannot support business needs

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable features are the collaboration and sharing."

"The workflow engine cannot support the business needs."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases are for

Central repository for document integrated with a core application.
The integration through web service with Oracle ERP and Oracle CCB
In addition, we use SharePoint two build a library for different projects for collaboration and sharing propose.

How has it helped my organization?

It has improved my organization in the following ways:

Gave us the ability to integrate with other systems that need a lot of customization.
Offers alignment between user permissions in SharePoint and other systems is not exist.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are collaboration and sharing.

What needs improvement?

Workflow engine
Video streaming and huge file retrieving and uploading
It does not support video streaming and huge file retrieving and uploading
The workflow engine cannot support business needs.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used SharePoint for six years.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's not expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate other options.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Eric Wyatt

IT Director / CIO at Matanuska-Sustina Borough

Oct 3, 2019

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Integrates well to improve access, coordination, and collaboration

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable features are the Integrations, web site, and search."

"The areas of this solution that need improvement are the relationships between lists, cross-site web parts, and page-building tools."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution for intranet, extranet, web site, content management, collaboration, integrations, eCommerce, inventory, portfolio, project, and process management.

How has it helped my organization?

This solution has given us better access, coordination, collaboration, and visibility. It is an enterprise system for many functions instead of multiple systems to support. Interactive intranet instead of static web pages, integration of other systems to include GIS. We also have better search capability.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are the Integrations, web site, and search.

What needs improvement?

The areas of this solution that need improvement are the relationships between lists, cross-site web parts, and page-building tools.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for nineteen years.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Cecil Rupp

Works at Command Results, LLC.

Aug 10, 2019

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Supports us in software development projects and integrates well with Microsoft Project

Pros and Cons

"This solution has helped us with the categorization, organization, management, discovery, and delivery of program and project related information."

"This solution would benefit from the implementation of enhanced online forms and template development capabilities."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution for supporting software development programs and projects.

How has it helped my organization?

This solution has helped us with the categorization, organization, management, discovery, and delivery of program and project related information.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration with MS Project.

What needs improvement?

This solution would benefit from the implementation of enhanced online forms and template development capabilities.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this solution for fifteen years, off and on.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Again, no problems on our applications.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have never seen it hit a wall in terms of supporting our programs, and I have been the senior contractor program and project manager overseeing two large Health IT projects, both with more than 100 team members and as many as 11,000 assigned tasks.

How are customer service and technical support?

he Microsoft reps were always helpful; although they were not always up to speed with the latest offerings and capabilities from Microsoft. Persistence pays off thought. I usually eventually got the answers to my questions.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

NO, client requires use of SharePoint for content management on IT programs and projects.

How was the initial setup?

It seemed easy enough. The one issue I had was setting up a project portal where we wanted to implement a number of SDLC Templates via SharePoint. This was a couple of years ago, but the integration of a legacy Microsoft forms product was not very clean or adequate. It looks like the previous tool has been replaced with Microsoft Forms. I haven't had a chance to use this product yet.

What about the implementation team?

In house.

What was our ROI?

Confidential

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't have experience in that area.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No, client requires use of SharePoint for content management on IT programs and projects.

What other advice do I have?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

MichaelSoliman

Owner at Alopex ONE UG

May 26, 2019

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Good for optimizing business processes in organizations of any size

Pros and Cons

"For any organization with more than one person in it, if they are trying to organize things to let people in the company know what others are doing, then this solution is good for them."

"I would like a simpler, more cost-effective solution for connecting data sources with workflows and BI tools, or data mining tools."

What is our primary use case?

I have been consulting with this solution, combined with SQL server, since 2005. The majority of my consulting at that time changed from Active Directory and C++ to SQL Server and SharePoint.

What is most valuable?

This solution is a workflow operating system with many metadata services. Information is taken and automatically triggers actions. The specific action is based on the information itself, which is used to calculate a complex answer that results in the action.

What needs improvement?

I would like a simpler, more cost-effective solution for connecting data sources with workflows and BI tools, or data mining tools. There are different tools for data mining and for data evaluation, but you have to be a skilled programmer to tie them together. There is no simple and low-cost method to do this, provided that development time is a cost factor.

There are some automatic solutions for this task, such as Team Foundation Server, which is built on SharePoint. These tools can learn specific errors that are being made, using data mining techniques, and they are able to target these errors for correction. Having this capability built in, and customizable for the customer would be of great interest.

I would like to see support for Visual Studio to connect to SharePoint and have a wizard to connect data processes to iHubs, like an analysis server or data mining model, to an output, and to have a smart way of creating workflows. Microsoft will tell you that they already have that for SharePoint online, it's called "Flow", but it is not customer compatible.

For how long have I used the solution?

Since 2003.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable after the hotfixes, or service pack has been applied. This has been the case for each release since 2003. If you take the release directly to the customer then it is almost always a big mess for them during implementation.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This solution is extremely scalable. It is a highly performance-optimized web service that you just have to install correctly and then add the machine to the farm with the proper permissions. That is one of the biggest strengths of SharePoint.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is extremely well developed with Microsoft. It's just that you have to pay for it, so it is not for someone without Software Assurance.

How was the initial setup?

The setup of this solution is complex. There are SharePoint deployment architecture scenarios, and sometimes the C-level deciders underestimate the complexity of it. You have to know SharePoint very well.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

For this type of solution, it is not wise to buy it without Software Assurance. It depends on the customer, but most are using an agreement that covers four to ten free incidents per year. You really need that, and it's well-invested money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When comparing this solution to other workflow operating systems like Oracle or BP Logix, I give this solution a ten out of ten.

What other advice do I have?

My advice for anyone implementing this solution is to first try everything that you want to do in a virtual environment, with people who know how SharePoint is programmed. You need to understand the psychology of business users because most of them omit essential steps when they are creating the business process model. They are used to doing things in their head, but the machine is not aware of everything that they know so some steps are missed.

Ideally, you want to buy a bunch of post-it notes and test your processes manually, by playing with different scenarios. You have to tune the business processes. I have seen projects fail because the debug phase of the business process design was not thorough.

This solution is useful for optimizing usual business processes, like writing an invoice. For any organization with more than one person in it, if they are trying to organize things to let people in the company know what others are doing, then this solution is good for them.

While this workflow operating system is better than others on the market, it is uncomfortable and expensive to really implement what you need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner.

Seniop9887

Director at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Apr 7, 2019

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Underpins solution which streamlines project workflow; the workflow intelligence could be improved

Pros and Cons

"The workflow feature is valuable because it enables us to cascade responsibilities."

"Workflow is something that can become more intelligent."

What is our primary use case?

We have a customized solution called TeamCenter. The technology behind it is SharePoint.

The use case is to distribute project mandates among team members, track and collaborate on the work that has been done. It creates the work breakdown, and assigns tasks, manages the workflow accordingly. We are able to check what is being done, who is been handling it, and where the workflow is at right now. It eases control, messaging, and provides a common view where we are at.

How has it helped my organization?

Now that this system has been put in place, we have email integration and a lot of work which we were doing manually is now done by Teamcentral, thanks to SharePoint, thanks to Microsoft.

What is most valuable?

The workflow feature is valuable because it enables us to cascade responsibilities. It cyclically keeps tabs on work and to what extent it has progressed, where it is stuck. That feature is really very helpful.

What needs improvement?

There is always room for improvement. Workflow is something that can become more intelligent. I can't say to what extent intelligence can added, but I think there is always a scope for making it more intelligent.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's going to last until Microsoft revokes the license on which it is built.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Since scale is not challenging me right now, I haven't really paid attention to its scalability. We have 12 users on it. Their roles are primarily deployment, resource management, and fulfilling the technical mandates people are working on.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have a previous solution, other than mail-messaging and Excel.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward for sure. I didn't see any complexity in it. The implementation took about three-and-a-half months.

What about the implementation team?

We used a consultant. He was technical enough to use the plug-ins and integrators that were required. He was a specialist.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing works for us.

What other advice do I have?

Workflow is helpful in the allocation of tasks in any close-knit teams, teams which are not sized beyond 20 to 25 at the most. If the workflow can be made more intelligent, adding value to the information rather than just pinging and cascading and shooting of alerts, that can really help with value-add and to save time.

There was one techy who designed and implemented this. Currently he continues looking at what is required, but in terms of continued support I don't have any staff on it. When any fixes are required, he handles them remotely. We don't have anyone on staff to manage it.

We expect the scale to go up and more business to pour in so we expect the number of users is going to increase. We would definitely be looking at a little more intelligent implementation of workflows so that we've got better control and better delegation of mandates.

I would rate it at seven out of ten. It works for me. I haven't seen anything parallel.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.