Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Reviews

Our primary use case is mostly collaboration. We use it for document sharing and things of that nature.  

I would say the collaborative part of the product is the most valuable. You can just send a link to to content to other people. You can get stuff done in one place and keep it centralized rather than attaching documents into a emails. Working this way just makes the job function a little bit easier.  

The product has a lot of room for improvement. A lot. The UIs are really clunky and Microsoft needs to fix that. Their access control is horrible and they need to fix that as well. I think overall that the look-and-feel and usability are really 10 years old. They have not done anything to improve and update it over that time. It is a good product. But updating it is definitely something they should look into. I do not know what their strategy is for lagging with the redesign of that.  

It needs better usability and enhanced features. I think SharePoint does allow you to create websites, but if you compare it with the other providers like even Google sites or Google pages, those solutions make it so much easier to create those pages. SharePoint is not up to speed on that functionality. I think that is something they can probably easily do.  

We have been using SharePoint for a pretty long time. It has been around somewhere between five and ten years.  

I think the stability of SharePoint is okay and not all too bad. If you compare it to Outlook —which I think is still not as stable as it should be after all this time — SharePoint is fine by comparison. Stability is generally not an issue.  

I would not know about scalability directly because I use the product and I am not involved in scaling the usage.  

I know that we have about 100,000 people in our company using the solution, and many of those will be using it on a daily basis. Certainly, it can handle high volume.  

I do not know if we have any plans on increasing the usage of Office SharePoint Server. I am not an IT person and I am not involved in that area of planning. Somebody else does everything to maintain the product and then I just use it for my document management.  

I do not really have the type of position where I would be contacting support over any issues I have with SharePoint. I know that Microsoft does not really have impressive support.  

When it comes to the installation, Microsoft has made that fast and efficient. You really do not have to do anything special to get going with the product. Everything is browser-based.  

I think we have a corporate license for SharePoint. We have a special arrangement with Microsoft because we are a reseller for pretty much most of the Microsoft products. Whatever our pricing is will probably not be like the standard model.  

I think SharePoint is a good tool. This is especially true if you are in the Microsoft ecosystem — as in being an Office 365 user — then SharePoint is definitely something you should look at as a solution for collaboration and file sharing. It is well integrated within the Office suite.  

They also have a thing called Microsoft Teams. I do not know how they are planning to use both these solutions in the field because Microsoft Teams also does quite a bit of the same stuff that SharePoint does. There is a lot of overlap.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Office SharePoint Server somewhere in the middle of the pack for products like it. It is definitely not the worst, but it is also definitely not the best.  

I would only give it only a four-out-of-ten because I really think they need to make a significant effort to bring it up to par.  

InfoPath and Nintex Workflow Engine are the features that are most important to me.

We used SharePoint to automate the documentation flow and develop SharePoint-based IT systems for licensing, managing documents, the help desk, and task libraries.

We used InfoPath forms to automate our organizational processes and forms, and managed the workflow for these forms using Nintex Workflow Engine. Using these features together, we converted our paper work to electronic digital data.

The Branding and User Interface Design and CK Editor should be improved, as well as the upgrade process.

There needs to be a clear and direct process for upgrade from one SharePoint version to another. The documentation available on TechNet is insufficient. We had to create a visual studio solution for the upgrade from SharePoint Server 2007 to the 2010 edition.

Multi-lingual support, including Arabic, is weak in the CK Editor. This is especially a problem when you copy Arabic from Microsoft Word. The format is not the same and we need to reformat the content every time.

There is also room for improvement in Branding and User Interface Design. One of our SharePoint environments is the internet-facing site: www.pcma.ps. There is not enough documentation or a direct process for redesigning the standard SharePoint interface.

I have been using SharePoint for six years.

For the most part, we did not have any stability issues.

We did not have any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as moderate.

Before we moved to SharePoint, we used a locally developed .Net-based system which had lots of bugs, and lacked features when you compare it to SharePoint.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy.

The licensing model for SharePoint 2013 and 2016 is more efficient than the 2010 version because they removed the internet edition, which was the most expensive.

We went directly with SharePoint because it was the content management leader at the time.

I highly recommend it, but it is better to hire at least one SharePoint expert so that you will have a good implementation and internal support.

It's really good because with its collaboration we are able to connect with people and we are able to share our documents online. We are also able to share on the fly when we have a call with the Microsoft Teams.

It is really helpful now because, with COVID, everyone is working from home. This product is very useful for us. We can chat and visit any time using Teams.

The most valuable feature is that it is very usable. I can navigate it, I can have a media call, I can have a call with my project team, so we can chat with every team kind of like WhatsApp. Any time there are projects or other things, we can chat in a secure way. It's automation-specific secure. 

The user interface needs improvement because there is a lot of stuff in there. I use five to eight navigation buttons. It should be more user-friendly. Frequently used menu items should be arranged in a proper way. That would be helpful.

We implemented it three years ago.

The stability is good. We don't have any issues because even though I work from home, many people connect to Teams and are using the product in multiple ways. We don't see any kind of performance issue or any other issues.

Because it's a cloud service when we add more users the product is scalable. We didn't have any kind of performance issues. We have around 10,000 users. There are many different roles that use it for day to day activities and communication purposes.

We don't require any people for maintenance but for troubleshooting, we have four to five dedicated staff members. 

We do have plans to increase usage. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is user-friendly.

We go through the tutorial and you will be able to do everything. The only problem is when we are migrating from legacy to Microsoft. There are a lot of problems in this there, those things are worked out by Microsoft.

It took almost six months to roll up.

We move from one location to another location and we work with the clients across the globe. This product is useful because when I go to the client place I can use my credentials, I can log in and I can share whatever I want to share from SharePoint Server. It is flexible.

I would absolutely recommend it. It is a very collaborative tool and we believe in Microsoft. We trust it because they keep on upgrading the latest versions from the security purchase. I know the usability is good and also the costs are less compared to the other products.

There is a limitation of 200 people for the conference feature. That limit should be raised.

I would rate it nine out of ten. 

Our primary use of this solution is for in-house staff. We have six SharePoint sites, each secured autonomously for access to content, and we have not at this time shared outside of our domain. When we have consultants or partners that need access then we provide them a local account.

One of the value adds from SharePoint is the version history of any given document, which when we first began using it was, I believe, ten versions by default and now it's gone to over one hundred with no extra effort. If somebody modifies something then you can go back a hundred versions of that document to see who did what and at what time. I think it even tracks on which IP address the changes were made. If there is a concern about rogue access using an authenticated account, we can go back in time and research that.

The most valuable feature is the "Alert Me", which provides the ability to set an alert on a SharePoint folder or file when the content is either added or changed and that the alerts can be either real-time or aggregated for the day or the week.  One or several team members can be informed thus helping in near real-time updates to the team and actions where required.

The integration with Office 365, and the ability to edit the files using any of the products in the suite is very valuable.  Recent update to

If you're a legacy, long-term user of SharePoint, there are challenges moving forward to the newer user experience that works with groups. It is a complex migration process and there's a lot of manual effort involved.

If a file is moved or renamed then the links to it are broken. Ideally, a unique internal and persistent identifier should be used to access files to prevent this problem. When you start building a large repository of several hundred thousand or millions of documents that represent decades of history, you may want to enhance the name of something that was really poorly described in the past. However, if there's an external link to a website or an external link that you might've saved within your own office to access that content, it becomes annoying when you break things. It would be nice if they would abstract that so that it's an internal structure that uniquely identifies the document version, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the file name or its location within SharePoint.

I know that there is some degree of workflow in SharePoint, but there isn't easy awareness of what that means and how to easily utilize it. I think there can be some enhancements done there to make it a lot easier for people to, for example, migrate a paper process to be a workflow for permissions or authorization, thereby leveraging the SharePoint platform.

The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF. You can open them online, but that's an extra step and it would be nice to have a thumbnail to quickly review the content in that folder. That, to me, is a missing opportunity. These are known standards that file managers can work with.

We have been using this solution since 2015.

The stability is like any hosted service on the cloud. We have not had any outages from a SharePoint perspective, but there is always the risk that if connectivity to the cloud fails on the worldwide web then there may be some concerns. Right now we are exploring a mechanism by which we can back up our content and we're looking at a third-party solution from Veeam.

This solution is very scalable. In our current case, we're using less than twenty-five accounts, but I have some colleagues using the same deployment approach with hundreds of accounts and from what I've experienced using their access, I don't see the difference as a user. So the responsiveness when there are larger or fewer accesses seems to be minimal.

In prior employment, I have utilized the on-premises deployment of SharePoint. However, with my current employer, we had discreet local file shares through network-attached storage that we migrated to cloud services storage for SharePoint.

In this organization, we used DocuShare from Xerox prior to SharePoint.

The pros from a Xerox DocuShare perspective is that it abstracts the access of a file through a unique internal identifier so that no matter where the document is moved or renamed, there is an existing saved link to it that never breaks. With SharePoint, if you change the location of a file or you change its name, you are breaking those links. That to me is a weakness of SharePoint and definitely something that's much more robust and well thought out from Xerox.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's answering through a wizard a few questions such as the time zone and the amount of space you want to allocate to SharePoint. You're pretty well right off the gate and ready to use it in less than ten minutes.

We performed the deployment ourselves, driven mostly by myself, and it was not a complex process.

There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider.

We have not yet migrated to the new user experience, but we have recently enabled some new user interface views just to make it look more modern. It provides a nicer alphabetical view of folder content and provides a more elegant menu bar at the top of the screen to give you more control.

I like DocuShare from Xerox; however, because of the integration of documents stored in SharePoint to be edited by any of the Office Suite products, that overpowers and is a greater good than what DocuShare brought to the company. It is a compromise, but the compromise is a positive one because of how pervasive the use of Office is around the world.

They've been aggressive, being Microsoft, in evolving some of their other offerings like Forms Online, and evolutions to OneDrive in the cloud. SharePoint has been somewhat stable other than the evolution recently with groups, but other than that it's not clear how they're really strengthening it. There may be some opportunities as well to improve the document previews. A lot of people might have graphic file formats that they want to be able to preview but are currently unsupported.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Document library is the most used part of the portal solution. With the optimized search service, we easily keep all company digital content on SharePoint Server.

Workflow management automation features can be implemented easily without need for software development using SharePoint Designer.

Enhanced user access management features fully integrated with Active Directory allowed us to gain the trust of the users and they use SharePoint to store and share all company digital content created by them.

The multi-language support allows collaboration using local languages in eight different countries.

Allowing information to be shared across the company using the document library on SharePoint improved the effectiveness of our operations and new projects.

Consolidating all company digital content on SharePoint allowed creating company know how, which is used to improve our operations and new projects.

Implementing business process automation using workflow management improved company efficiency, allowing process transparency and possibility for follow-up at each step of the processes.

Implementing business process automation using workflow management allowed us to stop using paper.

There is no feature to show the workflow progress graphically.

Although there are different templates for graphical design, when you need any customization, especially on the main page, you need software development.

The solution requires a lot of hardware capacity for high availability and performance.

There is only one licensing model for the on-premise option and the licensing cost is high.

When you create forms using InfoPath Forms and workflows using SharePoint Designer there is no easy way to move the workflow and the forms from development to test and from test to production environment. The only way is to do the same job twice(if you have development and production environment) or three times(if you have development, test and production environment).

We are using SharePoint Server for more than nine years; started with 2007 version and made the upgrade to 2013 version in 2013.

I have not encountered any stability issues, but proper capacity planning and management is essential.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; you can easily add features, hardware capacity, etc.

There is a lot of documentation. You can easily find information on the blogs. Microsoft provides support at affordable rates. The implementation project can be a challenge. In Turkey, we have problems finding good architects, not just for SharePoint but for any solution.

We didn’t previously use another solution.

The planning was a challenge because in Turkey we have problems finding good architects, not just for SharePoint but for any solution. We solved this by asking for support from Microsoft.

Doing proper requirement analysis is essential. At the moment, SharePoint provides a server/call-based licensing model for on-premise implementation, so the number of users is important. The cloud option can be considered if the number of users is below 100. There is a need for database server licenses, too. (We use Microsoft SQL Server.) In my opinion, there is no need for Software Assurance.

We didn’t evaluate other products because back in 2007, SharePoint Server was the only option.

If you already decided to implement SharePoint Server, plan at least two servers if you are implementing on premise (one for database, one for application services). Adding a third server for only the search service can prevent performance problems. Do Active Directory integration if you decide on the cloud option.

If you are at the research stage of your project, be aware that at the moment, there are a lot of alternate solutions that can provide needed features. After doing a business requirement analysis, do research for alternate solution, so you can have the solution you really need. You might be able to get it free of charge, because some open-source solutions can meet your needs too. Think about implementation consultancy and support if you decide to implement an open-source solution.

Don’t implement different products for different features because integration is a headache.

The solution meets all our needs, including workflow management automation.

With SharePoint, we have done multiple types of projects. It's a complete ECM, Enterprise Content Management piece. We have implemented something like Power App forms for big oil and gas companies based out of Houston. Power App forms for outages can work in offline mode, which is helpful. We also use it to work on tablets and mobile phones as well and that kind of stuff.

There's a lot of features that are quite useful. Building Flow and Power Apps is great. Eventually, we started to use it for platforms too, however, now it's gone, it's not there anymore. SharePoint Online, both classic and modern versions, we have worked with extensively and so we know it very well.

The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version.

Microsoft is working to improve the solution daily. They're always adding more features and functionalities.

The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations.

We've been using the solution since 2007.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. The online version doesn't have any bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or fail. It also doesn't need any infrastructure or virtual machine as it's all completely online and the cloud keep it very stable. You don't need a backup because it is backed up by Microsoft.

As a Microsoft partner, we get fantastic customer service. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

While the solution was not complex to set up, I did find that it had a medium level of complexity, so it wasn't quite straightforward. The online version is a bit easier to manage than the on-premise version.

We're an end-to-end service. We provide implementation services to our clients.

Our customers handle the licensing costs. The pricing varies from customer to customer. Some, for example, might have Enterprise Agreements, or EAs, and that pricing is different.

We are a Microsoft Gold partner. I don't use the solution myself. I'm a consultant. I suggest solutions such as these to my clients.

If our clients, for example, are on Office 365 or on-premise and they want to migrate, that is where we give guidance. We'll ask: Why not move online? Why not use SharePoint Online, rather than using the on-premise version? What are the pros and cons of both? Then, if they would like to move forward and migrate, we can handle implementation for them.

We use the solution as a suite altogether, and SharePoint is part of it. It also has Teams, Power Apps, Flow, etc. It's all part of the Microsoft Office offering.

We used to use the on-premise version, however, since somewhere between 2010 and 2013 we've been using the online version of the solution. Most users are no longer interested in maintaining infrastructures if they don't have to.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of SharePoint is as a document library, or repository of files, for our project management sites which are basically communication sites. We're currently using the solution on-prem but have also used it on cloud. We have a vendor relationship with Microsoft and I'm a business system analyst

I like the way the solution was helpful in delivering project updates. I can incorporate my project timelines presented in web page format along with the KPIs. The documentation repository is within the same page too so you have the updates, the timeline status, and the documents which you can pull out. It means you can collaborate with others all in the one location.

The solution could probably be improved by incorporating some of the power apps for workflow and easy set up. I usually get most of the workflows in automated mode and we're barely using the full features of SharePoint. I think it could be simplified so it doesn't require coding. For example, if there's an ad hoc workflow, it could be added immediately instead of going to a different application. If they could incorporate and enhance the user friendliness of SharePoint with the workflow of SharePoint, that would be great. 

I'm not sure it's feasible for SharePoint to integrate with mobile gadgets as an additional feature but if they were able to do that, it would mean that even if you have external documents, they can be extended to any variable whether it's a gadget, tablet, watch or whatever. Right now, the SharePoint site can be rendered in mobile apps, but there's a limitation, it doesn't extend to smart watches.

I've been using this solution for about six years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had any issues with scalability. It's quite easy to scale up or down. 

I don't have much interface with the Microsoft Office because it's usually the SharePoint architect or developer that needs to make contact with support.

I would recommend this product. I've also used Citrix ShareFile and if I compare that solution to SharePoint, my preference would be to go with SharePoint. It's a more user friendly and intuitive solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for data management and internet files.

On the on-premises deployment model, the most valuable features are the processors and portals. On the cloud deployment model, the most valuable feature is the portals.

The level of stability is good.

The solution has a lot of options to develop it out.

We typically use Google to find the answers we need.

The solution is like a CRM, so the initial setup is complex. It takes a few days to deploy the solution and the length of time depends on how large the company's topology is and what the client's demands are.

The user should use an integrator to help with the implementation.

We use all deployment models and are a provider of the solution.

The solution is a Microsoft product, so they are constantly improving the solution. They also want the user to be the implementor, as opposed to the developer. They're working on a product that can be used out-of-the-box as much as possible.

In terms of advice, I'd suggest users find an expert in the system who can give them advice on how best to use the solution. There are a lot of options and abilities. If you aren't familiar with the solution, you may not realize what it can actually do and how to successfully use it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a very good product.