SharePoint Reviews

Among the most useful features I like are: the site permissions (distributed governance model), the social enterprise features (micro blogs, activity feeds, community sites, Following, Likes and Reputations), app store, search and query, external data access, security, site management and site customizations.

It's been a process-improvement catalyst in the sense that it enabled and empowered real-time collaboration and dashboard tracking of business intelligence reports and performance analytics. It's certainly reduced the number of hours needed to create, update and maintain worksheets and forms hosted on legacy systems, databases and it also reduced overhead on obsolete file repositories.

Well, for SharePoint Online, the add-on features which are free tend to expire within a month or earlier. It would be great if these free add-on features would last longer or last permanently.

I have been using SharePoint since 2012.

We have not encountered any deployment issues, fortunately.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The customer service I would rate a 3.5 out of 5 (5 being highest); responsive, timely, proactive.

The tech support I would rate a 3.5 out of 5 (5 being highest); responsive, strategic, proactive and precise.

We used an open-source CMS (Joomla-based) and due to the limitations, we switched to SharePoint.

Very straightforward setup and not that complex.

We used our in-house support team to deliver the implementation.

Not sure about ROI.

Do your due diligence first and conduct an in-depth discovery session with stakeholders prior to designing your solution that uses SharePoint as a platform

We evaluated Alfresco and Confluence, and then decided on SharePoint.

Ease of use, ease of setup, ease of administration, ease of configuration, ease of customization... what's not to like? SharePoint's got exactly what you need. Just don't expect too many frills, bells, whistles in terms of UI, but even then, it gets the job done.

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.

The collaboration features of SharePoint 2013 are probably the best I have seen in an enterprise product out of the box. Along with the integration of Office and other enterprise solutions, this product cannot be beat in the market currently for what it brings to the table.

There are times you may want to alter how SharePoint works using custom code. This is very important as I have seen developers who are here one day and gone the next with bad code that was based on .NET, recreating what SharePoint does naturally, no acceptable documentation left behind to work from and will not accept calls accept for a fee.

So think before implementing customizations using code, you leave room for error in the code and a gaps in business processes that may need to be updated later. If the code is not using best practices for development on the SharePoint platform Microsoft updates to the server could also effect the successful implementation of these updates as well. If you can bare with using out-of-the-box tools this gives you a stable environment, where Microsoft updates these features and the foundation of the product for you.

There are third party solutions that would be a better fit for the platform that are tested and vetted by Microsoft for a price and maintenance fee. These are better suited for a SharePoint platform than custom code because you know what you are getting and you have someone to call on when things go wrong. I am not saying these are going to fit your every need but most of the time they do help get you a lot closer then where you are out-of-the-box.

The use of the document management features such as versioning, check in and check out, search, managed metadata and other out-of-the-box features help you organize and manage documents easily. Finding documents and being able to track documents wherever they are in your site makes this tool easy to use and cuts down on an employee’s time looking for documents, using email to manage documents and knowing they have the right version of the document because it’s in a centralized location.

There are training aspects in using the tool effectively, but do not take long to grasp and understand. Workflow is also improved in this version of SharePoint. Workflow lets you create a business solution using the combination of functionality within lists and workflow actions to create a business process that flows through an easy or more complex process. SharePoint Designer 2013 allows you to create these flows within the tool once the SharePoint farm is configured to host the integration of the tool.

From my experience, it’s not the product needing improvement, but the way organizations deploy the enterprise solution. When 2007 SharePoint came around, there was no documentation and information given by Microsoft on their website. You were on your own, basically, looking at blogs and relying on others' failures. Now, there is no excuse to have a badly configured SharePoint farm and or using best practices to make sure your configuration is solid.

There are organizations who deploy this solution enterprise-wide with no training for users or administrative IT support, which is also a big area that needs improvement. Although SharePoint is fairly easy to use, you still want to get total buy-in on the product, so training helps bridge the gap to get that buy-in to use the product going forward. It also helps to show how users can make the most of the solutions and services SharePoint has to offer. Coming up with a couple of how-to demonstrations and even a site with some bells and whistles the users can play with always helps with getting support of the new solutions and services.

Organizations are also not providing governance as to how the user community will use the solution within the organization. Governance is the most important aspect of getting the solution configured for your organizations use. Providing rules for everyone who plans to use the services of SharePoint 2013 is the key to success. Also, bringing representatives from all departments as stakeholders into a working group to meet, vote and share information about what they would like to do with the new tools is also key. You can avoid duplicate efforts for development and other pitfalls that may fall outside of your governance plan by including other departments. This way, your new SharePoint farm does not get the wild, wild west treatment where everyone is doing their own thing.

After working and supporting over 100 companies, I can honestly say only two companies had governance documents in place at their organization, with working stakeholder groups to support the solutions and services. Remember, governance helps with looking at restricted and accepted practices within the solutions and services provided by, in this case, SharePoint 2013. It's just like going to the Office 365 site and looking at exactly what I can and cannot do within the cloud offering, which could be based on data sizing and other parameters I might be looking for to support my organization.

The governance document is used for on-premise implementations, so you can design, install and configure your internal farm based on those configuration parameters laid out in your governance documentation. After you get the governance rules in place, you then create a design document that will capture all configurations within the farm. This will layout how the SharePoint farm should be configured based on SQL, SharePoint, backup, restore, DR and any other third-party tools and configurations.

The next document would then be your installation guide, which is based off of the design document. This shows how all the components mentioned in the design document will be installed and configured based on the design document's configuration parameters. This is just a quick summary of what needs to be done before you do anything with installation of software. Following best practices and other Microsoft documentation for all these documents and the installation of the software is the key to success with this enterprise solution.

I have used this version for 3 1/2 years (15 years overall with SharePoint).

In some very rare cases, you might see that Windows updates can interrupt your service, but Microsoft is very quick to fix the issue. Other than that, it’s the users’ empowerment that is in play in this environment overall. You are providing a platform that empowers the users of the product to manage themselves. For example, instead of a call to the help desk, you have what are known as site collection administrators and owners. These power users manage the security of the site. So, instead of having a call to the help desk, the group’s power user can manage these calls themselves, which takes a load off of the help desk. This is one of many examples.

SharePoint 2013 is very scalable. The problem is IT departments that don't understand the solution start in the wrong direction, which can lead to reinstalls and other interruptions because of the initial configuration. Again, following best practices and building a good solid foundation is how you avoid complications later with growth and other scalability issues.

Microsoft has great support for this product, as well as the SharePoint user community, where there are sites with information you can search from any search engine. Microsoft also has technical support pages that give you insights to installation, configuration and troubleshooting the product. You can also call 24/7 and get support from technicians from all aspects the product uses, such as SQL Server, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, PowerPivot and other integrations. There are also many third-party solutions out there to help with all aspects of the product from functionality, usability, 508 compliance, BLOB storage, backup and recovery, and a host of other areas in this version of the software.

I was a FileNet administrator but switched to SharePoint because of the integration of the Office products. I know that FileNet is a great product as well, but Microsoft has done a great job of integrating SharePoint with the Office suite. This drove my decision to move to SharePoint as a support engineer.

The initial setup as explained is complex. You need to understand what you’re doing as an IT engineer and also where this product will be in five years, as far as it being part of your enterprise. If you set up the wrong version of the product or the wrong version of SQL Server, you will not get the features you might be looking for. It’s best to see how the product will be used by your organization, and the bells and whistles your management is looking for to solve issues within your company.

When choosing a platform, just be aware there are choices. The choice you make in the beginning can make or break your installation and your goals for your organization. Think clearly and meet with other departments. Don't let IT do it alone. You want the buy-in and input from all parts of your organization.

In choosing options for services we looked at eRoom. eRoom’s interface was primitive and did not provide the functionality we were looking for and integration with Office. It also was not easy to use and it was not easy to empower users to create sites and manage their own security easily. I also believe that the training would have been more in depth with this product, as with Microsoft they have a way of making interfaces similar so you know where to look to find information and menus.

Find a certified person or company that can help you get started. This might cost a little up front, but your return on investment will be great. Do not go it alone. Again, the initial implementation is everything to the foundation of the product working for you. The version of software you choose can also determine what services you can make use of and can save you money.