SharePoint Reviews

Collaboration, DLP, and the search capability are some of the features I like the most.

It has improved our productivity to a great extent with its great collaboration features. Previously, business users were sharing documents through emails while different people contributed to the same document. This created a lot of confusion, such as:

• Issues with merging changes from some users
• No tracking of changes
• Version management

The business users had to spend a lot of time to get this to closure. SharePoint has helped a great deal in this space.

• UX
• Performance (especially Office 365): This is an issues when the sites are accessed from Asia/Australia, which is bad compared to accessing from the USA
• The mobile experience

I have worked with this platform/tool for more than eight years.

The current version is very stable compared to versions 2007 and 2010.

There are some performance issues with respect to the amount of data that has to be stored.

The technical support is very good.

I have seen customers using other tools and switching to SharePoint. Technology upgrades and feature upgrades are the key reasons for this.

The setup is complex, as you need to consider lots of things for the farm design.

The pricing is good. I have heard that MS gives very good deals on volume licensing.

It's a good tool, but be prepared to adapt to the new way of working with SharePoint and Office 365. They bring their own new features which are very good, but you will experience a learning curve.

Depending on the customer’s needs, one or more features become more relevant and important. If I were to generalize and extract the most common features that the customers have used, I would say:

• Web\document content management
• Integration with the Office suite
• Collaboration over the content, sites, BI, search, and workflows
• One or two-way integration with other enterprise applications

I see the strength of SharePoint working as an extendable framework/platform for customers of various sizes, on premise as well as on the cloud, but not as an independent niche product/solution around a specific feature.

Our Intranet is built using SocialXtend, a SharePoint based product.

It has transformed the way we do our daily tasks and the way the departments collaborate over projects, opportunities, and other operational activities.

Knowledge sharing and access to information has been highly simplified.

Almost all of the areas of the product have room for improvement; some more than others.

• At a high level, mobile, custom development/testing frameworks, BCS, external services integration, and BI may need to catch up more as compared to the other feature sets.
• SharePoint is a combination of multiple products working together. It has come a long way, and the improvements are being pushed at a much faster pace than they used to be earlier. This fail-fast approach of adding features quickly instead of a longer release cycle is a much better way to develop a product in my opinion.

I have been using SharePoint since 2001 in multiple capacities, such as a solution host, or as a full-fledged enterprise solution for on premise, as well as on the cloud.

My personal observation is that if the implementations are done in the right way by following the recommended best practices and guidelines, the product works just fine.

To be clear, I am referring to all the underlying products (IIS, SQL Server) as well as to the O/S.

There have been genuine issues. However, we have used SharePoint and CU to address them.

We have not had scalability issues in SharePoint 2010 and onwards.

Technical support is good.

We used solutions from the Java world. Those, as well as this one, are based on the customers' needs.

For simple farms, things are pretty straightforward. But for complex farms, I have not yet had that experience.

To be fair, it’s not SharePoint all the time. It’s a combination of other environmental factors and third-party products as well.

Documentation management is the most valuable feature for me. As a technical writer, the ability to add, edit, manage and move documents is a daily task and SharePoint allows me to do that effectively.

The search function is imperative in this product and used frequently to locate and update information for our global and diverse teams.

SharePoint has allowed our organization to effectively share important information across lines of business globally. I am able to deliver effective information to all of our internal orgs immediately and can receive feedback for updates in real time.

I’ve personally experienced some difficulties in creating new pages, as this tool isn’t a web designer’s dream. Providing a list of existing pages that are named the same or similar to the new pages one might create would be helpful. Being able to toggle into those pages without exiting your original page would also be beneficial. I’ve also noticed limitations with copying and pasting fonts and images.

I have used it for seven months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Our company has used other solutions to meet various needs. We are still in the process of converting into using SharePoint for our knowledge base, etc.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Confluence and ZenDesk.

Create a structure for organizational pages from the beginning and document that for anyone who wants to create new pages/structures within it. One confusing thing I see often are existing pages that are “named” the same as ones that I need to create, and the existing page doesn’t have any of the information I’m trying to share.

Integration with Office 365 and Active Directory, and access from all our company users as part of the Office 365 licenses. Also, hassle free access from mobile devices to sites, forms, and lists, with powerful content search and preview.

We use it for all intensive document sharing business units and especially for document versioning control (quality control area in manufacturing). We also use the online forms (Infopath) to automate simple procedures in conjunction with Microsoft Flow..

The cloud-local file synchronization application (OneDrive for Business). It is not as simple as expected, but it works.

I have used SharePoint since 2013. From on-premise to the online version.

Sharepoint Online is a mature product.

We have had no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability, but you must buy additional storage if you use the given amount within your tenant (enterprise plans: 1 TB + .5 GB per subscribed user).

The customer service is very good.

Technical support is really good; fast responses and good resolutions within the standard included support.

We used SharePoint 2010 on premise. We switched due to the license cost and to give access to all our company users. Also, because SPO was included in the Office 365 plans. As a SaaS, it is always up to date.

Setup was not complex at all. We used third party tools to migrate productive sites and the new sites were created easily. The main difficulty is user adoption. It must be done with a lot of workshops.

We implement through a Microsoft Partner. The expertise was very high.

No ROI calculation, but today we have almost all of our procedures online - paperless office.

You can always make a good deal with Microsoft, especially shortly before the end of their fiscal year (July).

We did a business case and technical evaluation of Google Apps and Office 365. The winner was Office 365 due to user familiarity.

It is always good to start with a special need in a business unit and show quick wins to other units, as part of the adoption plan.

• Document management and permissions: For the document management functionality, I really like the way that we can create the views of documents and very easily create column metadata.
• The flexibility of document sets and being able to manage access with permissions
• The permissions functionality is outstanding. There is the ability to have group or individual permissions. The complete granularity of being able to apply permissions at collection, site, library, list, folder, and doc set levels give ultimate flexibility.

It has completely replaced our Intranet and provides a great central storage area that is far more accessible than traditional shared folders on file and print servers.

As we are still on an older version, it is difficult to answer this. Primarily, the mobile experience is wanting in SharePoint 2010.

I have used SharePoint for five years.

We did not have any stability problems.

We did not have any scalability problems.

Technical support is good.

Our previous system was shared folders and file and print servers.

I was not involved in the decision.

Office 365 and SharePoint online is the way moving forward. Integrating it with Yammer and Office 365 groups provides a much greater feature set than SharePoint alone.

I especially value document sharing.

The product has made document sharing with customers easier instead of emailing.

I would like to see the following:

• More freedom given to a power user
• Feature development on a site collection level without the need for farm-level rights

I have used the product for three years.

I encountered no stability issues.

I don't think that this whole review is worth the effort as we are talking about a product (Sharepoint 2010) that is six years old, close to end of life, and not sold anymore. People who are new to this will certainly look for the latest version which I have no experience with.

We are mainly using the document sharing feature to share documents with customers in a secure way. 

Actual development depends on server-side tools (Visual Studio running on the Sharepoint server itself), administrator access rights, and activities that cannot be done from machines. I guess this is by design, and probably is not going to be changed.

• Mostly the documentation management features.
• Managing information such as events and announcements, document libraries, picture libraries, using calendars, lists and custom lists.
• Sharing files, document storage and retrieval, the check-in and check-out functionality, version history, custom properties, customized views, customizable workflows.
• Collaborative team sites for sharing and managing information.
• Search features, including advanced content processing, managed metadata, and continuous crawls.
• Security features, including permissions and document/page/site control.

We are now able to organize and control our documentation easily. Versioning, check in, check out and setting permissions for pages and sites enable us to manage our document and picture libraries without a fuss. We can now easily find documents within sites and pages, as long as documents are named and tagged appropriately. We can now create more complex workflows using SharePoint Designer, which is easy to use. However some improvements to SharePoint's workflow functionality could prove useful.

Approved and updated templates and documentation are now available on SharePoint. This ensures consistency and standardization across the organization. Documents and templates are centralized in this one repository, and only selected individuals are permitted to edit documents within the organization’s main documentation library.

There is transparency to the organization; whereas, previously there was none. Knowledge sharing and collaboration is more prevalent; therefore, communication has increased. We use the SharePoint home page to make company announcements, such as employee birthdays, anniversaries ,and upcoming events. We have also recently started using SharePoint to automate some of our manual processes.

SharePoint Designer enables creating workflows easily. However, they produce errors at times. There seems to be glitches which require workarounds to sort out. It is an amazing feature to have because workflows can fully automate processes that would otherwise be manual.

SharePoint Foundation was found to be adequate to our prior business needs and has been used company-wide for the last two years. However, due to its limitations in features, a decision was recently made to move away from Foundation to either Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.

We have not experienced any serious issues regarding stability, except for the minor glitches with workflows. As previously mentioned, we are still on the Foundation version. However, I believe if SharePoint has been properly set up on a stable server, using proper governance and a strong infrastructure, we should not experience major issues with stability.

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues. SharePoint 2013 is reportedly scalable. As long as the solution has been properly configured, our organization should not experience any foreseeable issues.

We have not engaged with technical support from Microsoft at this time. We deal directly with in-house technical support. We will definitely be using external technical support from Microsoft when moving over to the Standard or Enterprise Edition.

We were previously using a network drive that we accessed directly from our laptops and desktops. There was simply no control of information and documentation; and loss of information occurred. There were inadequate, non-existent, or deep folder structures, messy content structures, and a lack of document management and control. Versioning was done manually. Important documentation with sensitive information was being stored on local drives. Updated templates and documentation were not being used.

There was a fair amount of research, investigation and infrastructure planning involved prior to its implementation and setup. SharePoint was a new initiative that was attempted by our in-house team. Initial setup was not so straightforward. It was a bit complex, as it is with most new products; but we did eventually get it up and running.

Our technical team is now up-to-speed, and the current process moves smoothly. With that said, it is useful to have prior technical knowledge and experience in SharePoint in order to facilitate a smooth setup and integration process.

Pricing and licensing options are structured according to the size of the organization. Good business leaders make the best decisions and choose the best fit for their organizations based not only on its business needs, resources and budgets; but also based on what people at their organization need and will use. Make sure that all areas of the organization buy-into it. Don't invest in a solution that you have not properly investigated first. Weigh out all your options first.

The SharePoint project had already been initiated before I joined the organization. However, since we are only on Foundation, the organization has embarked on a comparison between SharePoint and Confluence. After proper investigation and research, it was decided that both solutions were useful in their own right. Confluence is a collaborative working tool; and SharePoint offered a documentation management solution.

SharePoint and Confluence integrate well with each other. Confluence also connects with SharePoint. The business leaders and decision makers of our organization decided to test the SharePoint solution using Foundation 2013. Based on user feedback and interaction with SharePoint Foundation, they have recently decided to go with the Enterprise version.

I advise organizations or business leaders to fully investigate and research SharePoint, as well as all the features that are available for each edition. Based on your business needs, it might or might not be the right fit for your company. Properly weigh out your options and make the right decision for your organization, based on what your organization’s needs; how people work; or ideally should work.

Indecisiveness from a management and leadership perspective on what tool to use reflects poorly on the rest of the organization. Therefore, people feel discouraged.

SharePoint is a great document management tool. It works for me and fits the specific needs of my job. However, while it works for me, it is not being used in the same way by the rest of the organization, or sometimes not at all. There must be buy-in. It is best to survey whether people in your organization find this tool useful, and help them understand how it could best be used. It is also in the best interests of the organization to consult with a SharePoint Expert before, while, and after implementing SharePoint. Many organizations implement the best tools without helping their people realize the full potential of their use. Therefore, people become wary of new technology. They don't welcome the change and fail to engage with the new product.

• Flexibility to create customized lists and folders
• Ability to assign permissions
• Ability to create user groups and automated workflows
• Easy to use
• Provides flexibility to create separate user groups with specific read, write, and access for certain folders
• Ability to restrict access: Prevents the vendors from touching our master files

It has allowed my team to seamlessly share requirements with one another and provide feedback while working off one version. It is a one-stop shop for all our project documents.

We are currently working with two different vendors (one from Europe and one from India). We used SharePoint as a central workspace where the different groups can upload their files respectively without restriction. They can also have a central folder where RBC and vendors can edit simultaneously.

For this version, assigning permissions should be more intuitive.

An improved user interface would be beneficial. Achieving our goals in a multi-vendor project was not an easy task because of the 2010 UI.

I’m not sure if SharePoint 2013 makes it easier to assign specific access for folders. I found a lot of help online that was mostly for 2013.

We should have the ability to create customized permissions for user groups much easier than it is today. For example, being able to specify which lists and folders a group can access. In 2010, there is no easy way to do this.

I have used SharePoint for about two years now.

I did not have any stability issues.

I did not have any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

I have always used Microsoft SharePoint for my projects.

We have an excellent onboarding process that our IT team put together, so setup was not particularly complex.

I was not involved in this process.

Look at scalability and stability and see whether the features of the product really meet the needs of your organization.