SharePoint Reviews

SharePoint’s most valuable feature is its use for community building. It turns large scores of people into a more cohesive group by creating a central working environment for documents, conversations, knowledge sharing, processes, tasks and content.

We have a variety of use cases internally, but an easy one for everyone to understand is the creation of the “company meeting” slide show. Every two weeks, everyone in our company gets together to hear from each other about the “goings on” in the company. Each area of the business gets the opportunity to present a few slides. In the past, these slides were emailed to a central point and some poor person had to collate it before all staff arrived. Now, with SharePoint and Office 365, all the business areas are able to edit their part of the PowerPoint file at any time, from anywhere. This saves plenty of time, removes embarrassing copy and paste errors, and also gives staff a central reference point after the meeting to catch up on what was presented.

The user interface, although extensible, leaves much to the imagination when compared to modern websites. Companies, like ourselves, are able to transform the front end into anything, but this consulting process sometimes scares off would be clients. Adoption remains a challenge (not really a product fault). Lastly, the workflow remains a kind of ugly sister. Improvements have been made in the form of “flow” (only available on Office 365). But, all in all, companies normally have to invest in third-party tools, such as K2 / Nintex, if they really want to create enterprise-grade workflow processes.

I have been using this solution for 13 years.

We did not encounter any stability issues. In most cases, instability is caused by client or vendor implementation errors.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability. SharePoint actually scales really well as you’re able to add roles and servers to your heart’s content. Office 365 also has a number of clever resource throttling capabilities, which allows administrators to prioritize certain areas over others.

We received excellent technical support. We have no complaints there.

We never tried to implement a solution other than SharePoint.

In the early days 2003, the initial setup of SharePoint was highly complex, but nowadays it has been streamlined a lot. The challenge, however, is not the basic installations. It is creating something that is ready to take advantage of the scalability and other platform benefits without revising the architecture.

More than 75% of our interactions now are with clients that already have Office 365 (which includes SharePoint), so the pricing is normally bundled with that. We do discuss specifics when it comes to the amount of storage included. For on site deployments, clients need to license each server, as well as each client access license (CAL).

As a vendor, our typical scenario is that the product was already chosen, and we are just implementing it. As SharePoint is a platform with many capabilities, plenty of products compete with specific areas of SharePoint, but hardly anyone can offer everything that SharePoint does.

Before starting the project, it’s critical to understand what you want to achieve. Just installing it because IT owns it, will not accomplish your goals. If you have well-defined use case for it, and the solution is geared toward delivering on that ROI, SharePoint is a great fit. Special attention must be given to ongoing adoption and training and it’s critical that you choose your vendor very carefully. Many vendors understand a bit, but only a handful have walked the walk and know the many pitfalls of splash and dash deployments.

• 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.

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.

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.

The most valuable features are collaboration and sharing.

• 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.

I have used SharePoint for six years.

It's not expensive.

We did evaluate other options.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It is used to support Intranet. It has good content handling and MS Office integration, but poor user experience.

It has allowed documentation control and distribution through the organization, managed easily from the AD.

• The lists handling is perfect, and any kind of content linked to them very easy to publish.
• Creation of communities is very straightforward.

The user experience is very poor. Configuration for new aspect means usually buying add-ons or a very high level of customization.