Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Reviews

I'm a product development manager and we are resellers of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. 

I like the collaboration, the ability for multiple users to work on a single document and be able to firstly collaborate and share notes about the document, as well as being able to work on the document without losing the information. Previously, there was little control over who had the latest document and this was a big challenge for us, trying to consolidate all of the aspects together. This provides a way for us to work together. It's really important, collaboration is one of the key reasons we have the software.

The areas around security, such as protection and things like that have not been available, and I think the product could be improved in that area, particularly when you are scanning documents from the scanners for sharing. IBM has got the capability in their content management solution, but SharePoint doesn't have it. It's an area where the competition already has those features, so including it would go a long way to ensuring that the software is at least above the requirements. 

I'd like to see security protection as an additional feature. I'd also like to see features on AI, on artificial intelligence. I know IBM has a product and their mobile capture application that is scalable on Android, so iOS uses the AI to really help you capture a document using your phone. So whenever you're taking the photo of the document, AI is available to crop through the document to auto-check for you, and it captures the angle for that document just using your phone. It uses AI to read documents such as invoices, and it's able to auto-capture your invoice number, the date, etc. All of this is AI-enabled, so it is AI that is reading the invoice and getting key parameters from the document such as the invoice number, the date, the purchase amount, and it populates this in the content management. This is a feature that I'd really like to see in SharePoint, and their use of AI to help in content management terms.

I've been using this solution for about four years. 

It's a stable product. 

It's a scalable solution but the competition also has software that's really scalable. That's all I can compare it to. 

We generally get our support from a different business partner and not from Microsoft directly. From Microsoft, the support normally takes longer than we need and it's not a route we appreciate. We prefer getting support from an IBM business partner, it takes less time. 

Of course the price could be lower. The competition has a much more expensive product, but in terms of the features that are available, they also offer more. In my opinion, the price of SharePoint is fine because it's relative to what the competition has and in terms of the features the competition is offering. Here in Africa, cost is a big factor in making decisions. I would say almost 70% of organizations will look at cost first, and then probably 25% will look at the features the product offers. The cost is really a big factor. Then there's the question of whether it's open sourced.

Given the amount of time I've spent using enterprise product management solutions, Microsoft really ensures that their software is easy to use. There is readily available documentation. Support can take a while and we had to pay for it from another source, but the knowledge base for the product is really good. The community around the products is great, not just locally but even on the internet. You find user groups and communities that are using the application. 

I would rate this solution an eight based on how easy it is to use.

With SharePoint, we have done multiple types of projects. It's a complete ECM, Enterprise Content Management piece. We have implemented something like Power App forms for big oil and gas companies based out of Houston. Power App forms for outages can work in offline mode, which is helpful. We also use it to work on tablets and mobile phones as well and that kind of stuff.

There's a lot of features that are quite useful. Building Flow and Power Apps is great. Eventually, we started to use it for platforms too, however, now it's gone, it's not there anymore. SharePoint Online, both classic and modern versions, we have worked with extensively and so we know it very well.

The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version.

Microsoft is working to improve the solution daily. They're always adding more features and functionalities.

The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations.

We've been using the solution since 2007.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. The online version doesn't have any bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or fail. It also doesn't need any infrastructure or virtual machine as it's all completely online and the cloud keep it very stable. You don't need a backup because it is backed up by Microsoft.

As a Microsoft partner, we get fantastic customer service. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

While the solution was not complex to set up, I did find that it had a medium level of complexity, so it wasn't quite straightforward. The online version is a bit easier to manage than the on-premise version.

We're an end-to-end service. We provide implementation services to our clients.

Our customers handle the licensing costs. The pricing varies from customer to customer. Some, for example, might have Enterprise Agreements, or EAs, and that pricing is different.

We are a Microsoft Gold partner. I don't use the solution myself. I'm a consultant. I suggest solutions such as these to my clients.

If our clients, for example, are on Office 365 or on-premise and they want to migrate, that is where we give guidance. We'll ask: Why not move online? Why not use SharePoint Online, rather than using the on-premise version? What are the pros and cons of both? Then, if they would like to move forward and migrate, we can handle implementation for them.

We use the solution as a suite altogether, and SharePoint is part of it. It also has Teams, Power Apps, Flow, etc. It's all part of the Microsoft Office offering.

We used to use the on-premise version, however, since somewhere between 2010 and 2013 we've been using the online version of the solution. Most users are no longer interested in maintaining infrastructures if they don't have to.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

It's really good because with its collaboration we are able to connect with people and we are able to share our documents online. We are also able to share on the fly when we have a call with the Microsoft Teams.

It is really helpful now because, with COVID, everyone is working from home. This product is very useful for us. We can chat and visit any time using Teams.

The most valuable feature is that it is very usable. I can navigate it, I can have a media call, I can have a call with my project team, so we can chat with every team kind of like WhatsApp. Any time there are projects or other things, we can chat in a secure way. It's automation-specific secure. 

The user interface needs improvement because there is a lot of stuff in there. I use five to eight navigation buttons. It should be more user-friendly. Frequently used menu items should be arranged in a proper way. That would be helpful.

We implemented it three years ago.

The stability is good. We don't have any issues because even though I work from home, many people connect to Teams and are using the product in multiple ways. We don't see any kind of performance issue or any other issues.

Because it's a cloud service when we add more users the product is scalable. We didn't have any kind of performance issues. We have around 10,000 users. There are many different roles that use it for day to day activities and communication purposes.

We don't require any people for maintenance but for troubleshooting, we have four to five dedicated staff members. 

We do have plans to increase usage. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is user-friendly.

We go through the tutorial and you will be able to do everything. The only problem is when we are migrating from legacy to Microsoft. There are a lot of problems in this there, those things are worked out by Microsoft.

It took almost six months to roll up.

We move from one location to another location and we work with the clients across the globe. This product is useful because when I go to the client place I can use my credentials, I can log in and I can share whatever I want to share from SharePoint Server. It is flexible.

I would absolutely recommend it. It is a very collaborative tool and we believe in Microsoft. We trust it because they keep on upgrading the latest versions from the security purchase. I know the usability is good and also the costs are less compared to the other products.

There is a limitation of 200 people for the conference feature. That limit should be raised.

I would rate it nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case of SharePoint is as a document library, or repository of files, for our project management sites which are basically communication sites. We're currently using the solution on-prem but have also used it on cloud. We have a vendor relationship with Microsoft and I'm a business system analyst

I like the way the solution was helpful in delivering project updates. I can incorporate my project timelines presented in web page format along with the KPIs. The documentation repository is within the same page too so you have the updates, the timeline status, and the documents which you can pull out. It means you can collaborate with others all in the one location.

The solution could probably be improved by incorporating some of the power apps for workflow and easy set up. I usually get most of the workflows in automated mode and we're barely using the full features of SharePoint. I think it could be simplified so it doesn't require coding. For example, if there's an ad hoc workflow, it could be added immediately instead of going to a different application. If they could incorporate and enhance the user friendliness of SharePoint with the workflow of SharePoint, that would be great. 

I'm not sure it's feasible for SharePoint to integrate with mobile gadgets as an additional feature but if they were able to do that, it would mean that even if you have external documents, they can be extended to any variable whether it's a gadget, tablet, watch or whatever. Right now, the SharePoint site can be rendered in mobile apps, but there's a limitation, it doesn't extend to smart watches.

I've been using this solution for about six years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had any issues with scalability. It's quite easy to scale up or down. 

I don't have much interface with the Microsoft Office because it's usually the SharePoint architect or developer that needs to make contact with support.

I would recommend this product. I've also used Citrix ShareFile and if I compare that solution to SharePoint, my preference would be to go with SharePoint. It's a more user friendly and intuitive solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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.