Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Reviews

Our primary use of this solution is for in-house staff. We have six SharePoint sites, each secured autonomously for access to content, and we have not at this time shared outside of our domain. When we have consultants or partners that need access then we provide them a local account.

One of the value adds from SharePoint is the version history of any given document, which when we first began using it was, I believe, ten versions by default and now it's gone to over one hundred with no extra effort. If somebody modifies something then you can go back a hundred versions of that document to see who did what and at what time. I think it even tracks on which IP address the changes were made. If there is a concern about rogue access using an authenticated account, we can go back in time and research that.

The most valuable feature is the "Alert Me", which provides the ability to set an alert on a SharePoint folder or file when the content is either added or changed and that the alerts can be either real-time or aggregated for the day or the week.  One or several team members can be informed thus helping in near real-time updates to the team and actions where required.

The integration with Office 365, and the ability to edit the files using any of the products in the suite is very valuable.  Recent update to

If you're a legacy, long-term user of SharePoint, there are challenges moving forward to the newer user experience that works with groups. It is a complex migration process and there's a lot of manual effort involved.

If a file is moved or renamed then the links to it are broken. Ideally, a unique internal and persistent identifier should be used to access files to prevent this problem. When you start building a large repository of several hundred thousand or millions of documents that represent decades of history, you may want to enhance the name of something that was really poorly described in the past. However, if there's an external link to a website or an external link that you might've saved within your own office to access that content, it becomes annoying when you break things. It would be nice if they would abstract that so that it's an internal structure that uniquely identifies the document version, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the file name or its location within SharePoint.

I know that there is some degree of workflow in SharePoint, but there isn't easy awareness of what that means and how to easily utilize it. I think there can be some enhancements done there to make it a lot easier for people to, for example, migrate a paper process to be a workflow for permissions or authorization, thereby leveraging the SharePoint platform.

The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF. You can open them online, but that's an extra step and it would be nice to have a thumbnail to quickly review the content in that folder. That, to me, is a missing opportunity. These are known standards that file managers can work with.

We have been using this solution since 2015.

The stability is like any hosted service on the cloud. We have not had any outages from a SharePoint perspective, but there is always the risk that if connectivity to the cloud fails on the worldwide web then there may be some concerns. Right now we are exploring a mechanism by which we can back up our content and we're looking at a third-party solution from Veeam.

This solution is very scalable. In our current case, we're using less than twenty-five accounts, but I have some colleagues using the same deployment approach with hundreds of accounts and from what I've experienced using their access, I don't see the difference as a user. So the responsiveness when there are larger or fewer accesses seems to be minimal.

In prior employment, I have utilized the on-premises deployment of SharePoint. However, with my current employer, we had discreet local file shares through network-attached storage that we migrated to cloud services storage for SharePoint.

In this organization, we used DocuShare from Xerox prior to SharePoint.

The pros from a Xerox DocuShare perspective is that it abstracts the access of a file through a unique internal identifier so that no matter where the document is moved or renamed, there is an existing saved link to it that never breaks. With SharePoint, if you change the location of a file or you change its name, you are breaking those links. That to me is a weakness of SharePoint and definitely something that's much more robust and well thought out from Xerox.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's answering through a wizard a few questions such as the time zone and the amount of space you want to allocate to SharePoint. You're pretty well right off the gate and ready to use it in less than ten minutes.

We performed the deployment ourselves, driven mostly by myself, and it was not a complex process.

There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider.

We have not yet migrated to the new user experience, but we have recently enabled some new user interface views just to make it look more modern. It provides a nicer alphabetical view of folder content and provides a more elegant menu bar at the top of the screen to give you more control.

I like DocuShare from Xerox; however, because of the integration of documents stored in SharePoint to be edited by any of the Office Suite products, that overpowers and is a greater good than what DocuShare brought to the company. It is a compromise, but the compromise is a positive one because of how pervasive the use of Office is around the world.

They've been aggressive, being Microsoft, in evolving some of their other offerings like Forms Online, and evolutions to OneDrive in the cloud. SharePoint has been somewhat stable other than the evolution recently with groups, but other than that it's not clear how they're really strengthening it. There may be some opportunities as well to improve the document previews. A lot of people might have graphic file formats that they want to be able to preview but are currently unsupported.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use cases are document archiving, revision control, and workflows.

This solution has provided us with a collaborative workspace to allow everyone to work together and be on the same page.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use and learning.

I would like to see more Agile techniques and seamless integration with other applications.

I have been using this SharePoint Server for five years.

I use this solution for mixing and analyzing data.

The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it.

Stability and the reporting system need improvement.

The interface is friendly but you have some limits and you have to use your imagination to make the graphs better.

In the next release, I would like to see the possibility to integrate market information directly into the product. It will help us in saving time.

I have been using this system for what seems like forever. I have been with this company for two years now and before this, I was using SharePoint.

This solution is not very stable. It is useful to arrange data but it's not the best for big data. Sometimes we have issues with our reports as a result.

This solution is scalable, but we do not have many tasks to integrate this product.

Previously with this company, we have not used another product. This is the only one.

This solution was already in place when I arrived, so I was not a part of the initial setup.

I haven't had a lot of time to explore this solution better and I am sure that it is better than what I know about it right now.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I work as a team leader of IT Systems Development for the fire department. It's a government organization and we are partners with Microsoft. We use SharePoint internally, mainly for our employees. There are about 20 who use the solution now, most in admin or engineers. We are now also looking at other systems that may be developed using SharePoint too.

The most valuable feature of the product is that it's robust and you can access many features from Microsoft, such as Exchange, through SharePoint. It makes for an interesting product. 

The product could be improved by accommodating different technologies, particularly integration. Hopefully, Microsoft won't change the product because they tend to do that. 
I'm not really sure about additional features but I think using SharePoint as an application server means it's competing with other similar products like Oracle Application Server, and they should aim for that level. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

It seems to be a stable solution. 

The solution is scalable but I think it still has its boundaries. For our environment, it's good enough.

As far as I remember, the initial setup was not complicated. It took perhaps a week to set up and we had a team working on it. 

We used to deploy the solution on-premise only, but we've now started moving over to Cloud and eventually we'll deploy only on Cloud. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

The solution's most valuable features is its document management. It allows sharing with external users and integrates well with Office apps and Microsoft Flow.

The interface is okay for the type of work users do on it.

The licensing needs to be improved, especially when there are a lot of users. It's okay if there are a handful of users, but when there are 20 or 30, paying monthly for all of these licenses is difficult.

The solution needs to enable better sharing capabilities between users and external users. Several users also have problems with linking their emails to their Microsoft account.

The solution is mostly stable. If the service is not available, it's only for a few minutes and will restore without any intervention needed from our side.

We can help our customers scale easily. It's not a problem for them, because they are small and medium-sized companies.

Techincal support is good. I am able to open cases through the partnership channel to Microsoft and they solve any problems we have. I don't have issues dealing with them.

The initial setup is straightforward. Deployment takes anywhere from two weeks to a month.

I've been using the solution for four years. We use the public cloud deployment model. There's no on-premises deployment model. We are a Microsoft partner and typically work with small and medium-sized companies (about 50-80 employees).

Normally I recommend this product. However, there are others in the market that could offer the same capabilities or the same features, but at the same cost without a license.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable features for us are their document management list and hybrid forms. We also use third-party add-ons to achieve workflows and other recent apps.

One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost. With the on-premise version, you pay for the license once. For the cloud version, there is a recurring fee.

The truth is there are some places where SharePoint is pretty decent for the thing that it does. Microsoft has a very good product. It's difficult to find room for improvement because you can get add-ons that support it. With SharePoint, if you are not subscribed to the SharePoint environment libraries, you can probably get third party tools that you can add on to it. It's difficult to see other tools that allow people to collaborate on documents and data in these libraries. 

I think these tools do a pretty good job. There is only one area of improvement. Maybe Microsoft can invest a little bit more into the ease at which integration can be done with other third-party applications.

I know that Microsoft released SharePoint 2016, but I don't know if there is SharePoint 2019. We have only worked with the higher version of SharePoint since 2013. I don't know how much they have done in the area of integration. I think integration is a very important area of focus for SharePoint because it's very easy for SharePoint to become the go-to area, where everybody in your organization can come. Your costs, documents, sites, lists, and data can all be in one place. I would like to see them make it easier for people who are not using Exchange to connect to different data sources.

For example, a lot of people are using Google Apps. If I'm using Google Apps, there are plugins that we can just plug into SharePoint automatically to share documents and Google spreadsheets seamlessly. A Google spreadsheet can be imported into a SharePoint library. You can also point a SharePoint library to a Google spreadsheet, or the data source coming out of Google spreadsheet.

Integration also should include tools like Tableau, Salesforce, and some of the top software out there. It's not good enough to have website integration. That's not enough. You want to make an integration where Microsoft can build a wizard and you can just click a few times to create the integration. Then, just enter your username and password and point to the URL.
Those custom integrations are crucial, especially for smaller businesses. For large organizations that are deploying SharePoint in the enterprise, they already have an IT department, resources, and tons of administrators. They already have resources that can quickly build web services, called drivers or connectors. For small organizations, however, it would be good for Microsoft to invest in connectors. Microsoft can build and provide connectors for some of the more frequently used integrations, such as PayPal, Google Apps, Salesforce, SAP, etc. I think that would be great.

There is another area that Microsoft can improve on. I don't know what they have done with InfoPath. I think that's still a mystery. There's still a very big opportunity for form development and apps development framework that you can use quickly. Otherwise, Microsoft is telling everybody to go and buy two licenses to do serious forms of development. I think that's going to be a problem. I know that they're trying to encourage their partners to build those tools. However, workflows and easier to use and more robust forms infrastructure on top of SharePoint would go a long way. It is very expensive. They expect everyone to pay $20 or $30 per user per month. Microsoft can definitely help if they can build some of those capabilities, especially for people that want to invest in SharePoint. You're not investing much in to get some of the functionalities out.

We've been using this solution for eight years.

Most of our customers are enterprise customers. For enterprise customers deploying SharePoint, the setup is quite complex. If you don't know what you're doing, you can get yourself into trouble very quickly if you have a lot of data or users. It's very simple when you have a pair of small deployments. Then you can just click next a couple of times to engineer a solution. It's quite complex, however, if you have lots of users or you have terabytes of content. If you have a complex deployment, it gets very tricky and you have to get people who know what they're doing to be able to deploy even though there are challenges.

That's another big problem with Microsoft SharePoint because there was nobody to warn us and tell us at the beginning that, for enterprise deployment, we needed to think very carefully about certain things. It took us some time to build the competencies to understand the tricky areas. We had to learn what to do about performance and so many different things on an enterprise level.

The bottom line is that SharePoint is indeed for complex deployments. You just have to get the right team to be able to deploy it properly.

It's difficult to rate in general because there are so many different parts of SharePoint. As a personal collaboration, I would rate it as eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for data management and internet files.

On the on-premises deployment model, the most valuable features are the processors and portals. On the cloud deployment model, the most valuable feature is the portals.

The level of stability is good.

The solution has a lot of options to develop it out.

We typically use Google to find the answers we need.

The solution is like a CRM, so the initial setup is complex. It takes a few days to deploy the solution and the length of time depends on how large the company's topology is and what the client's demands are.

The user should use an integrator to help with the implementation.

We use all deployment models and are a provider of the solution.

The solution is a Microsoft product, so they are constantly improving the solution. They also want the user to be the implementor, as opposed to the developer. They're working on a product that can be used out-of-the-box as much as possible.

In terms of advice, I'd suggest users find an expert in the system who can give them advice on how best to use the solution. There are a lot of options and abilities. If you aren't familiar with the solution, you may not realize what it can actually do and how to successfully use it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a very good product.

I primarily use the solution for consulting purposes.

The solution's most valuable aspects are its collaboration capabilities, its communications site and the innovation within the product itself.

The permission management features need improvement.

The search functionality on the on-premises version is not very good. We brought this up with technical support, but they said there wasn't anything they can do. This needs to be improved in a future release.

The solution could use integrated bots or some form of AI.

There needs to be the capacity to share links. They do it already on the cloud, but not on the on-premises version. It would be good to have to capacity to share a link to a dedicated person for a specific duration.

The solution is getting more stable, however, we do find bugs from time to time.

The solution is scalable.

Reaching out to technical support is sometimes difficult because the first step is always to send the logs, and my client, which is a private bank, cannot send the logs like it's typically done, so it's difficult to work with them. This may be specific to my client, however.

The initial setup is straightforward. It used to be more difficult, but it keeps getting easier. The time it takes to deploy the solution depends on the project and could take a full day, but I have had a client in which deployment took an entire year. 

For deployment and maintenance, it depends on the size of the company, but you would most likely need only one to two people. 

I'm a consultant, so I work with multiple deployment models.

The product is very good. I'd recommend it to others.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.