SharePoint Reviews

Digitizing the document flow, storage, exchange and backups along with integration of Epicor. Also, it provided a direct interface with third-parties.

• Moved from papers to digital. 
• Removed the need of paper storage and people flow into the office.

Document flows, storage, and numbering take off the actions for checking and assigning the numbering and running around with approvals and pre-approvals. 

• Improve the user-friendliness.
• Make it more intuitive.
• Make it more like a flow/BPM view style.
• More hints and make it more user-customizable.

We use SharePoint as a document management solution.  It has allowed us to centralise and more efficiently manage our templates, letterheads and other company-branded elements.  Our Document Library is a central repository for our user manuals making it easy for consultants to access the right information for each implementation.  We also use SharePoint to manage our policies and procedures. 

SharePoint has streamlined our documentation management process by allowing us to automate several functions. The version control function has been particularly useful, helping us keep detailed records of changes to documentation. This has removed the risk of human error and streamlined the process.  The ability to review the notes for each version has and to easily revert to a previous version has proven useful.

SharePoint has also helped us improve the accessibility of official company documentation across our different teams.

In conjunction with SharePoint Designer, we’ve also been able to create a social hub on our SharePoint homepage where we can share news, photos, and company announcements.

SharePoint's document management and workflow features have proven to be the valuable. We have been able to implement a reliable, easily accessible document library with version control (previously managed manually) and an announcements workflow that allows us to communicate site specific news easily.

I find the search feature in SharePoint foundation to be limited to the basic document properties. This is at odds to the type of customization that you can apply in the library. For example, we added a field to specify the department but found that the field had little or no bearing on the search results. We found it hard to determine how SharePoint uses the document properties in the search, and whether it uses anything beyond the document title.
Once we had a better understanding of Foundation's limitations, we updated our properties accordingly, with a strong focus on the document title property as a search term. This involved an extensive rework of our existing documentation structure and naming conventions to better suit SharePoint. Despite these changes, we still can't seem to get our version of SharePoint to return meaningful results, even when searching an exact document title.
I realize that this is a limitation of the version that we are using but I would like the Foundation search criteria to be more clearly defined so that document managers know what they are working with from the start.

We have had no stability issues that I am aware of.

So far, we have not had any issues with scalability. We are investigating upgrading to the Enterprise edition in the future, so this may change.

Our technical support is all in-house, so I can’t really supply a meaningful response.

I have found a wealth of support information (on SharePoint blogs and forums) which has helped me troubleshoot a variety of issues.

As already mentioned, our previous documentation solution was manual, using a folder structure accessible through Windows Explorer.

The switch to SharePoint was motivated by the desire to improve availability of our documentation and to streamline our document management processes.

Initially, I was only involved in the setup of the document management portion of our site. I found it very user-friendly and easy to configure.

Since then, I have been involved in the setup and maintenance of a second site from scratch. Although certain aspects have been quite easy to configure, I experienced a lot of difficulty when working with user permissions and content types.

The content types were difficult to configure initially. When I need to edit or update certain properties, I could not determine where, or how, to change them. We eventually decided to remove them from our implementation.

I’m not able to offer an informed opinion about pricing, but if you are looking for a robust document management system, the Enterprise edition might be the better choice.

The metadata features promise to improve the document search function. The built-in document management workflows seem very promising. These are the features motivating our desire to upgrade.

We considered replacing our SharePoint system with Atlassian Confluence. Although it does offer basic document management, it is not robust enough to meet our document management needs.

SharePoint has built in document management functionality, while Confluence relies on macros and third-party apps. We felt that the risk of relying on potentially unsupported apps outweighed any other benefits.

We still use Confluence as a collaborative work space and will be using the Confluence wikis as our knowledge base solution.

Our implementation could have been improved by a more detailed implementation plan that mapped out the exact use of each area and how to use it.

With this in mind, I would recommend that anyone who is considering SharePoint plan their implementation thoroughly before beginning.

Small process tracking for in-house requirements investigations, which are shared across several departments.

• Combined reports and data with timeline tracking.
• Better than looking into three systems to find the full picture.

• Metadata store
• Cascade dropdowns for selection of data sets.  

• Links to Outlook and native storage of emails. 
• Emails stored now do not display metadata in native format.
• No good process to import emails from several users into a single comprehensive SP repository.
• The linkages to external record stores could be beefed up.

Some solutions have been implemented in the company that I work for. Most of them are based on workflows and team collaboration.

It has made us faster and more efficient. Users just like working in this environment, as an MS Office desktop.

• Team collaboration
• Unique permissions
• MS Office web access 
• Quantity and variety of partners with solution development ability on the platform.

Allow more functionalities for the on-premise version. Do not force the move of content to a non-private cloud.

It offers an easy way to store unstructured content (.pdf, .doc, .xls, images) and to tag them with metadata. More complex solutions may involve workflow up receipt of the content.

Replace paper file cabinets with electronic images which can be duplicated for disaster recovery purposes. Workflow can be used to notify or obtain approval covering the document.

Too many versions being released in a short time period. Too much time being devoted to migration planning.

Over 10 years, working with different versions up through 2013.

Stability issues are usually related to poor architecture planning, or solutions developed without a knowledge of how the tool works.

If properly deployed, the solution is very scalable. It’s really easy to have many servers in a farm solution, and many farms in an enterprise solution.

Trying to get technical support from Microsoft is always challenging. It seems large Fortune 1000 companies can get support.

You can deploy a web/database solution but it will take a lot of development time. SharePoint is a Rapid Application Development platform where a simple library, indexed, can be deployed in minutes.

The setup is straightforward, however many of the architecture issues should be discussed prior to deployment. Matching the setup to the organization’s needscan make the installation complex.

It’s not cheap. Through version 2010, there was a "free" version called Foundation. All of the good features are in the Standard and Enterprise versions. Starting with 2013, the Foundation version was discontinued.
Licensing can be by server or by seat.

There are similar solutions, like Lotus Notes/Domino and open source versions.

Open source rarely offers support, and I wouldn’t want to have a systems issue with all of my content locked up.

As long as you work within the constraints of the software, working with out-of-the-box tools, the product is great. If you start to customize the solution too much or install code on the servers, migrations and upgrades become a problem.

Spend some time and money up front discussing your wants and needs with someone who is knowledgeable. For content management, think about the whole lifecycle, from receipt to purging the content from your system.

It has an easy to distribute administration capability, and can also scale to meet a large number of future needs. It also has the ability to produce very simple web application development products, freeing up my team’s development activities for more advanced needs.

We mainly use this product for our intranet and capital projects team. It has allowed each business unit the ability to “own” their portion of the intranet, and allowed our capital projects team the ability to effectively manage projects that require a multitude records request requirements and archival tasks. It is very customizable, and it possesses a very logical architecture.

As usual, Microsoft’s licensing structures don’t really seem to fit the needs of their products. This leads to always paying for a project you will never use fully or always be adding to. Also, the product does not perform 100% when used outside of a Microsoft based browser, Chrome, Firefox, etc. It’s getting better, but the architecture is still behind. This is largely the case for mobile as well.

We have used this solution for almost nine years.

The stability of the system is fine, so long as you have a well prepared support team for your Windows offerings.

Scalability is one of the great strengths of the product, in that it scales very well. As an added benefit, due to the ease of administration, a lead in a business unit can take over such responsibilities.

The level of technical support from Microsoft is very little to poor.

We did not have a similar solution in place. Our intranet was previously an added product to our hosted CMS. And for Capital Projects, we were using a mixture of standalone Microsoft Project install and file shares.

After getting the infrastructure setup and deployed, installing and rolling out the product was fairly straightforward. A little bit of planning was required to better understand the differences in Web Applications from Site Collections, but that was largely straightforward.

Really take your time in planning the needs you are trying to meet. The licensing is very difficult to get right, and not as easy as many other alternative. Add in about a 15% cost to the initial cost estimates. You will find yourself needing to add something.

We did a brief overview of the market, and found that 9 years ago, SharePoint was a viable solution. Since then, we’ve settled on using it in very narrow cases, and fill the majority of our needs with custom development.

Invest a lot of time and energy in the planning for your needs. You will find that infrastructure needs are imperative to map out in the finest detail. Otherwise, your system will be continually under-performing. Also, pay special attention to the CAL needs.

• Documents storage
• Collaboration features (lists, discussion boards)
• Surveys
• .NET extensibility
• Workflows

Mostly, because it facilitates collaboration and the ability to create custom workflows.

For the past few years, we've been mapping some of our manual procedures into SharePoint, through the use of lists, workflows, centralized documents, etc. This has allowed our organization to start moving away from manual and non-standard practices, to more repeatable procedures.

Flexibility and extensibility, above everything, could be improved. Extending the functionality of SharePoint is painful, at the bare minimum. Complex .NET coding, testing, debugging is necessary to extend the native functionalities. Even with the new "apps" concept in SharePoint 2013, the difficulties in expanding it are present.

I’ve been using SharePoint for the last three years.

We have had difficulty with stability. The configuration and administration of SharePoint is complex. This resulted in incidents when changes to other products were made, like Active Directory or Exchange. Time consuming maintenance tasks are necessary, otherwise your SharePoint instance will become unstable.

We have had scalability issues. I cannot speak about horizontal scalability, but the mapping of environments (Dev, QA, Production) is difficult. There's no logical segmentation that allows the creation of several environments to facilitate development and testing tasks. Additional instances of SharePoint are necessary.

Support is deficient. We depend on local vendors to get access to support and most of the issues we presented took more time to resolve that we wanted. It is not a platform for running business-critical applications.

We did not have a previous solution.

Initial setup was complex. The multi-step installation process is complex and has too many dependencies on other Microsoft products, such as Exchange and SQL Server.

I cannot speak about this as our product comes in an MSDN package.

Unfortunately there were no alternatives; I didn't choose this product.

Look for other options from different providers.