SharePoint Reviews

Feedback workflows ensure we don't miss someone when documents need reviewing and approval workflows make sure the right people are approving it, especially when there are new or temporary staff involved. They don't have to ask who is next in line. They just pick the appropriate workflow and it's all sorted.

We automated task workflows for document review and gathering feedback.

No additional features are needed at the moment, except bringing some of the alerting functionality from the on-premise to the online version.

I have used this for four years.

We did not have any stability problems.

We did not have any scalability problems.

We were using SharePoint 2007. We changed due to the product lifecycle.

Setup was complex. We needed to design governance and implementation architecture before deployment.

Get help. Pricing and licensing is tricky.

We didn’t look at any alternatives.

Consider SharePoint Online unless you have customisations. If you have customisations, try and get rid of them. They cause problems when upgrading.

When properly configured and understood, SharePoint can be an extremely valuable company portal for all manner of office-related functions, including document management, file sharing with versioning, forms, workflows, etc. The platform is also capable of custom applications with database connectors.

Currently, it is used as the default website for Intranet. Sites are available for each department. News and announcements are available on the main page, as well as the company directory. A custom HR portal has also been developed to be the method for onboarding and offboarding employees.

It is not very intuitive to most users. It can be customized, but it requires a SME with a great deal of experience and training.

I would like to see Microsoft build better site templates to help kick start those new to the SharePoint environment. Better documentation, training, and tutorials would also help as well.

I have been using SharePoint for over ten years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is average.

I’ve not used any other tools.

It’s now available as a part of Office 365, but a local, on-premises install has some advantages if keeping everything inside your Intranet is important.

Find out how others are using it. Examine good examples of custom applications and workflows. Consider using commercial add-ons as well.

When properly implemented and users are adequately trained, SharePoint can take the place of network file shares for most types of use cases. Instead of users never knowing where to find documents, or which document is the current version, SharePoint makes it easy to share documents and set permissions. A classic workflow that SharePoint handles easily is the review and edit of a document by multiple individuals. By using a workflow, each person that needs to review and edit one or more documents is notified by email, can edit the document (and depending on your release and configuration, multiple users can edit at the same time), and mark their workflow task as done. There is none of the confusion of emailing a group of people a copy of a document, getting all their edits back with a different copy for each person. With workflows, each person edits the same document and the initiator of the workflow knows when each person completes their review/edit. Later releases of SharePoint extend this functionality to the cloud, adding file synchronization for mobile devices.

Out of the box, SharePoint is not known for intuitiveness, and administrators and users alike tend to have a difficult time creating effective and usable sites. However, with some time and effort, and good training, it can be a very valuable tool and centralized location for a company or department. One very useful type of SharePoint site that can be created is a “Meeting Space”, where regular/recurring meetings are held. Agendas for each meeting can be setup, along with tasks assigned to each member, as well as a document library for documents related to each meeting. Project management sites are another useful tool for managing collaborations and project tracking, with optional integration with Microsoft Project.

From my perspective as a developer I would say that the most valuable features are :

• the wide variety of data source connections
• completeness of features
• strong query possibilities (customisation, SQL, MDX, macros)

Each year, managers have to take important decisions about the future based on voluminous reports which took several weeks to produce. Now, these reports have been replaced by a dashboard which is maintained on a daily basis.

• The suite is complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, complicated to work with. Cognos requires a bigger and more skilled centralized BI team.
• Cognos Insight, the self-service, desktop dashboarding and analysis tool designed is not quite at the same level of the competition like Tableau or Qlikview.

We have been using the solution for 19 years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. The version 10.2 we use is very stable.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. The contract between IBM and the organisation covers all the needs we have.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10. I had very few technical support needs but they answer correctly when required.

I am not aware of any previous solutions. I always use Cognos solutions for my BI needs.

The setup was complex. As I work for a large financial organisation, the security matters are very important. For that reason, we had to deploy the different components on many servers in different zones, separated by firewalls. We also had to support the needs for several tens of users for data analysis and a few hundred more users for data consumption.

It's not the least expensive solution in the market but if your needs are great in terms of functionality, number of users and amount of data, it is worth purchasing it.

We evaluated the solutions available at the time. Among others, these were Micro-Level, Business Objects and Hyperion.

I do not think it is possible to implement a solution to the scale of the one we had without the help of knowledgeable Cognos BI resources. Ideally, it is best to hire an expert or one or more good Cognos consultants.

Easy management of content and portal and the document repository features are a distinguishing point compared to a file server.

We use a document library with custom attributes and simple approval workflow. Some program enhancements with .NET enables the Quality Control department to distribute files to an extranet portal after senior Quality Control staff approval. Thousands of documents have been distributed in this way in the past years. This approval flow replaces ordinary emails with much clearer tracking of the workflow process.

Notification templates should be editable without coding. Also, summary notifications should be customizable too.

I’ve been using SharePoint for nine years.

When the number of documents in a library grows too high, there will be performance issues. There is no easy way to archive files uploaded to SharePoint unless you have extra budget to get 3rd party solutions like AvePoint.

Scalability is not a problem as long as you can virtualize the SharePoint server farm. Hardware speed acceleration could overcome the software limitation. In my case, one front-end server served 700 users.

Technical support is done by our vendor, not directly from Microsoft. My vendor was good on supporting SharePoint.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup wizard helps you with the install. It is straightforward and easy.

Pricing on the server itself is acceptable, but CAL licenses could be an issue if you are not an Enterprise Agreement subscriber, or you are opening SharePoint 2007 to external users. With the new license model on SharePoint online, the issue here is not applicable.

We evaluated Documentum.

I don't think anybody nowadays should deploy SharePoint 2007. However, the SharePoint online that comes with Office 365 is worth a look. But beware of sizing as the fee is charged by data size and processing resources that would affect your SharePoint online response time.

• Ability to collaborate with others in organization
• Ease of use
• Customization

All employees can view necessary interactions/documents, great task management and contact management functions.

Document libraries and document management could be improved.

I have used SharePoint for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.`

We have never required support.

We did not have any previous solutions.

There are free versions that satisfy most needs.

In our scenario, Team Portal was a really useful feature.

We used to keep all of our documentation on SharePoint. SharePoint's version control worked really well with our large range of documents.

Configuration and troubleshooting need improvement, especially regarding TFS integration.

I’ve used this for more than eight years as an integration with the Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

We had stability issues regarding the TFS integration.

We didn’t have any scalability issues.

In Brazil and India, I thought technical support was really poor. In my case, my tickets were transferred to international support. They weren’t able to help me.

We did not have a previous solution.

It was very easy to install, like most Microsoft products. I love Microsoft's way of keeping their setups very similar.

I don't have enough experience with SharePoint's pricing and licensing to give my opinion.

We didn’t look at alternatives. Integration with TFS was crucial to our teams.

I think they can look for free options in the case of small teams of five to ten members. Otherwise, this is an amazing option. I am very satisfied.

• Document management supports a wide range of capabilities including cross-folder views, custom views, group-by views, versioning, alerts, MS Office integration, workflows, and very flexible permissioning.
• Collaboration in general is quite capable, including calendars, tasks, custom lists, and the ability to easily view data from within MS Office, as well as the built-in apps support found in both cloud and on premises versions.
• Search is exceptionally powerful, supporting a range of hybrid on-premises and cloud configurations, with customizable display templates and refiners.
• The ability to leverage multi-level Taxonomy is useful for hierarchies, views, filters and navigation.
• The out-of-the-box Workflow capabilities are good, and easily extensible with excellent third-party applications.
• We found SharePoint makes an excellent framework for developing an intranet, with built-in support for multi-language versions that adapt to the user's preferred language.
• SharePoint has several excellent available APIs for extension, customization and integration with LOB applications.

By creating a platform for collaboration, it empowers users to collaborate and work together on documents, tasks and calendars.

PowerShell for Office 365 is exceptionally limited. The CmdLets available for SharePoint Online are focused on site provisioning and permissioning, and do not include CmdLets for managing Items, documents, libraries, folders, default metadata, tagging, and views.

Development can be a challenge, especially as the development model and direction promoted by Microsoft rapidly evolves, and product components get deprecated. The App model is necessarily restrictive in what it allows to be done, in order to maintain the stability in the multi-tenancy environment. This leads to moving to either client-side object model development, or splitting the application with some functionality done on dedicated servers outside the cloud-based SharePoint environment.

I have used this solution for 14 years

The early RTP versions can be buggy. There are always challenges with patches, but the product has improved over time.

The product is designed for scalability, except for the List View Threshold limitation.

Technical support is poor. Microsoft makes it tough to get quality support.

Initial setup is somewhat complex; it requires a professional for installation and configuration.

Cloud is the cheapest, but less flexible. The cost of the product is quite reasonable considering the feature set. The larger portion of the cost of the product is getting good professional help in shaping it to the organization's needs.

Before choosing this product, we explored alternatives such as Documentum from EMC (now spun off to OpenText), Slack, Box, Dropbox and even WordPress and Jive. However, for all-around capabilities that include not just document management, workflows, calendar, task management, blogging, calendars and overall business process management, we deemed SharePoint as the best overall.

WordPress for basic websites or Intranet is great, but there is no direct competitor for the full breadth of SharePoint. However, for narrow sets of functions, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Wedoist, Slack, and others offer competition.

Get a real professional to work with your team. Ensure training and collaborative working with users is included in your deployment plan. Adoption is key.

The valuable features are its integration with:

• The Office 365 ecosystem
• Other Office 365 services
• The Office application suite

We haven't rolled out Sharepoint online to the entire organization. However, we have been using it on a small scale within our IT function.

It has brought on improvements due to:

• Ability to easily share documents which reduces the instances of documents being emailed around.
• Accessibility from mobile devices which complements the file sharing capability very well.

I would like to see improvements in the interface. There is a somewhat convoluted way to change lists, columns, and even the site landing page.

Being new to Sharepoint, it wasn't obvious how to do things and where one actually starts. The recent Microsoft interface improvements are good.

We have been using this solution for sixteen months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We are using a different on-premise platform. The plan is to migrate to Sharepoint online for our document management and business process applications.

We are switching in order to:

• Migrate to a cloud platform
• Maximize our investment in the Office 365 platform
• Consolidate platforms
• Provide a more accessible, standardized, and integrated platform for our users.

The initial configuration was straightforward. The online support documentation is well written and easy to follow.

First understand the scale of what this product offers.

Don't hesitate to engage with a partner to provide best practice advice if you don't have the in-house skills or knowledge.

Ensure you understand what governance and compliance requirements your organization has to which you need to align the platform.

Have a plan on how you are going to structure the site collections and hierarchy.