SharePoint Reviews

I have used SharePoint as an integrated solution with Team Foundation Server.

The most valuable features are the SharePoint lists and the documents feature.

SharePoint integrates well with the Team Foundation Server and provides collaboration features for team members on a TFS Team Project. This has helped developers and project stakeholders in the organization to collaborate better and share information in the form of documents/updates.

Migrating SharePoint sites can be a cumbersome process and it usually results in the incomplete migration of SharePoint sites and data.

I have used SharePoint for three years, mostly as an integrated solution with the Team Foundation Server.

The product is quite stable.

The product is scalable.

We were not using any other solution.

The setup and installation are straightforward. Microsoft provides a good installation wizard for the same.

I was not involved in the pricing and licensing activities.

As both the Team Foundation Server and SharePoint are Microsoft products, they can be easily integrated. Thus, we did not evaluate other options.

SharePoint works very well within a Microsoft ecosystem. Hence, SharePoint would be a good choice if the organization uses the Microsoft technology stack extensively.

The ability to assign an attribute to a library artifact allows the site owner to create the appropriate views based on artifact attributes (category, owner, etc.).

I have updated my project sites with views that apply to specific business uses, such as a project manager looking for a document assigned to a phase in the project (i.e., planning, design, execution) or an engineer looking for a document type (i.e., vendor contract, design build diagram, user acceptance testing worksheet).

Unless you have worked with a SharePoint business analyst, designer or power user, managing individual sites does require training to understand the components of the site settings and content. Folks usually start using SharePoint as a file repository without any structure. It can be overwhelming when you have 1,000's of document that a user has to parse through if just looking for a specific title. Without a consistent framework consisting of a standard nomenclature established in the initial strategy of rolling out SharePoint, using SharePoint as a file share becomes unruly.

I've worked with various SharePoint versions since 2008 but more recently with 2010 and 2013 as a power user in managing artifacts for various project and programs.

Most instances of SharePoint are stable. I have rarely experienced instability. Usually, it’s the management of user names and groups that results in problems.

I am not at the experience level to notice such an issue.

Most of the technical support has come from SME's and internal developers.

I always used Sharepoint.

I have no experience with rolling out templates or actual new instances.

Get training for IT and training for your base user. Developing a framework (nomenclature, categorization and user needs).

I have found team sites offer much value to our organization. As a consulting company, it allows multiple consultants to collaborate on a team project for a customer.

We use SharePoint for companywide document management.

Although workflow is limited in SharePoint, we have used it for many onboarding processes, PTO requests, etc.

SharePoint has streamlined many processes and provided additional organization for our company. It has become a central location for both documents and productivity.

I would love to see a more robust workflow. There are 3rd party products such as Nintex and K2 that can be used, however I would like to see it built-in.

I’ve used SharePoint for 2 years.

Stability issues have been found with the database. From the infrastructure side, most people use dedicated databases for SharePoint so a simple reboot usually fixes the communication issues.

SharePoint is extremely scalable but requires planning ahead of time. You must answer some questions about your environment to determine how many servers and what SharePoint function(s) they will serve to meet the demands of your organization.

I have never used Microsoft technical support for SharePoint in particular, but Microsoft support is very good.

We used to use simple file shares and emails.

SharePoint can be very complex to setup initially (both infrastructure and back end design and implementation). The more scalable the environment, the more complex the setup will be. Generally speaking, a 3rd party consultant will be needed to implement the solution.

There are two options with SharePoint. They have an on premises and a cloud solution.

We did not look at alternatives.

Hire and communicate with a 3rd party consultant.

The valuable features are:

• MS-Office integration
• Workflow and approval process
• Security

We use this solution as central repository for all the corporate information systems. It is a point of reference in our organization.

Administration is still very complex.

We have been using this solution since 2005.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability, although our installation is a small one and doesn't have that problem.

The solution is a strategic product for Microsoft, and the technical support is very good.

Prior to this solution, we used shared files provided by the operating system.

The installation was very complex. Since our initial implementation, that process has been improved dramatically.

We considered open source products like Alfresco. We decided to purchase a commercially supported product.

It is a complex product that should be implemented carefully. Take into account the organization’s details.

I find that SharePoint when used for the right purpose, lends itself to be a fantastic collaboration and workflow service.

It is very easy to store documents, collaborate and archive documents with versioning and custom workflows.

SharePoint provides a simple way to store documents and we created lots of subsites to contain the courses and materials for our students.

We found that applying permissions were very easy, due to the integration with the Active Directory.

It was a shame to see the SharePoint Design being deprecated, as this was a great way to create very customizable workflows.

I have used SharePoint since the 2003 release, back in the year 2007. We initially used it as a Virtually Learning Environment and a business platform for our college.

We found it simple enough to manage and were able to integrate it with third parties.

There were very few stability issues. The issues are usually related to problems with the related Microsoft stack such as Windows Server/ SQL/ IIS.

When you set it up as a single server, you will quickly outgrow it. If deployed correctly SharePoint scales very well with the ability to provision multiple web front ends, dedicated reporting servers and SQL clusters. This all helps to remove a single point of failure.

As this is a Microsoft product, it can be difficult to obtain direct support. That being said, there is a thriving partner community around this product.

Before SharePoint, we used internally designed websites, WordPress and Drupal. We found that they did not provide the collaboration features and integration that we would have liked.

As we were new to SharePoint, we found that the initial process was complex. So, we hired a partner to perform the installation. Over the years, this experience has improved drastically.

As a an education institution, we had a very favourable pricing policy.

Read and research this subject area thoroughly. Reach out to the large community and visit others that have adopted this solution.

It has a lot of flexibility to store various document and lists. There are integrated workflows and it helps to improve the end user's ability to be more efficient.

Automating the basic approval processes is an easy win. You are no longer required to do the work in emails, but instead using the email as a conduit, you can facilitate the work in the work flow.

The rock solid central document storage makes it very easy for all business departments to have a standard location for their documents.

The user interface should improve. It is still a bit clunky for the new user to navigate around.

I have used this product for three years as an administrator and twelve years as an end user.

For the enterprise environment, I did not encounter any stability issues.

There were no scalability issues as such. However, the 500 items limit in views can be limiting in some instances.

I would rate the technical support a 7/10, i.e., by using the internal support teams with various level of knowledge.

We were not using any other solution previously.

For a medium to large scale business, it is excellent.

For a small business, there may be too much overhead costs and a steep learning curve for the solution to be adding any value.

In general, I find SharePoint to be a very useful tool when it's configured to allow end users a certain amount of flexibility. (In one of my previous assignments, all options were completely locked down. In that kind of configuration, the usefulness of the tool is highly dependent upon whoever configured the product. In this case, they weren't particularly good.) The latest versions of SharePoint are highly useful for configuring pages for managing and conveying large amounts of information, while giving users the ability to pinpoint the specific things they need with speed and accuracy.

Libraries and lists have a feature set that enables capturing large amounts of information and organizing that information in ways that enable multiple audiences/roles to use it effectively.

In my previous job, I built a site to support the PMO. It consisted of a top level site that gave a view of all projects undertaken by the organization and then individual project sites that were used to manage issues, risks, changes, action items, key milestones.

The top level site also contained links out to our scheduling software (SmartSheets). The individual project sites were based on a site template, making it very easy to instantiate a new one whenever a new project was introduced. All project information was contained within a single site collection and allowed both broad and deep searches and visibility of key project metrics.

I think that the current version of the product is actually quite good, but it's not always easy to find solid training and reference information, especially from Microsoft. Typically, third parties have better offerings than Microsoft, but it still requires a bit of searching to find the most relevant and easily absorbed material.

I have used Sharepoint in various forms since around 2003.

Over the last three years (three jobs as well), I've used SharePoint 2007, 2010, and 2013.

I have not encountered stability issues with either the on-premise or cloud hosted versions of the product.

I was never involved in planning for scalability, and have never been aware of any scalability issues in any of the places where I've used the product.

I generally avoid using Microsoft or Microsoft partner support where possible. Unless you are paying for their top-level consultants (which is frightfully expensive), you're often better off just looking things up on the internet and bookmarking the most helpful sites. In situations where support is being provided by internal staff, the results have been variable.

There's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of. You can use wiki's of various sorts and cobble together any number of open source or paid solutions that address a component of what SharePoint does. But that approach doesn't have the current product's level of integration and the maturity of its feature set.

I don't know about setup. It was never my responsibility. Since the products were in place when I arrived, I don't know who the vendors were that partnered with Microsoft to configure and deploy the product.

It's Microsoft; empty your pockets. Seriously, if you obtain SharePoint under one of their blanket licensing agreements you really need to pay attention to the terms and conditions, especially if your acquisition is part of Office 365. It's typically not very easy to drop licenses for a particular subcomponent under such agreements if you find that you're not using that particular piece.

This wasn't my choice. However, there's nothing truly like SharePoint in the marketplace that I'm aware of.

Know what you want it for first. Talk to other businesses using the product to understand their experiences. If it looks like SharePoint can bring real business value, then find the best implementation partner that you can find. I don't know the economic ramifications of cloud vs. on-premise, but I found the cloud version of the product takes a lot of headaches out of your hands with Microsoft being responsible to administer and maintain the back end.

Finally, be very wary of proposals from within your company to build all manner of applications, web sites, and data marts with the tool. Although SharePoint is capable of a lot of things, it may be better to purchase a purpose built product rather than rolling your own.

In the same vein, it is still important to have standards and enforce them within the organization, especially on how sites are structured if they are to be used by people in various roles and departments across the enterprise. Someone has to have a vision for the architecture of your SharePoint installation and use in order to assure you get full value. If folks get to do anything they want, you'll have a crazy quilt of unrelated data, applications, and web pages.

• Team site sharing
• Internal collaboration
• Intranet websites
• Document archive storage

Our pre-sales, technical and sales folks use SharePoint to archive files, share configurations and presentations, etc.

Intranet/website publishing tools and features are kludgy and sometimes defy logic.

The ribbon interface is not intuitive. Information rights management is difficult. It is not standards based.

The custom .net usage in fact requires Windows Azure, which takes the complexity to another level. Also, you need to build this into your existing business systems to make full use of the features.

Regarding publishing, there seems to be a gap with HTML 5 publishing tools and/or tools like Dreamweaver and such, which lack strategy, synergy and standards, from my point of view.

Also, searching for information appears based on Bing and that is utterly useless. One needs to bolt a Google search engine onto your solution for optimum results.

SharePoint in either server or cloud offerings is itself very complicated in terms of all the moving parts to consider, which takes time to figure out regarding feature sets and use cases for them.

It would be nice to see a top-notch web-publishing tool that a five year old could use to go with the suite of Office online applications with much better integration with serious 3rd party search tools.

It’s nice to have server or Azure based options, but a hybrid cloud that offers both needs some work. Neither HPE or Dell are competent with their appliance offerings in the CPS space that could be offered as a package, if customized and developed into a single SKU appliance-based platform with all the goodies inside the rack.

Plug, play and connect…customize, develop and deploy. Repeat...

I have used SharePoint for four years at various customers plus my own company.

I have never encountered stability issues.

It has not reached it’s scalability envelope yet.

Outstanding support on SharePoint, in particular from Microsoft.

We used NetMax. The OpenStack Linux stuff is hacked like no other.

Setup is very simple, though all the features take a while to get your arms around (foundation, server, designer, business sync, etc.).

Use volume licensing to get the best pricing from Microsoft for a customer.

We looked at NetMax and various Linux offerings.

Tread slowly and do the basic training.