SharePoint Reviews

Our primary use case for SharePoint is for document sharing and file sharing in projects where participants are from different organizations. It is a very good tool for users or participants of teams from different tenants inside the organization.

What I like most about SharePoint would depend on what the task is, e.g. if it's just simple document sharing then the document library is fine. The most exciting feature of the platform is that it's a no code or low code development platform. There's also Power Apps and Power Automate.

Despite the enthusiasm and very good promises offered by SharePoint, the usage of the power platform is limited, so that's an area for improvement, but I would suggest this just as a team feature.

It's hard to highlight other areas for improvement, but a better approach towards licensing power platform components for guest users would be great. SharePoint licensing costs could be lowered to introduce it to the outside guests of a tenant, then to supply them with power apps and power automate features.

A more straightforward integration with Azure, including better licensing in terms of using Azure components and functions, is also another area for improvement in SharePoint.

My advice for Microsoft, and this is something I'd like to see in the next release of  SharePoint, is for them to constantly improve training material. Currently, the training material is organized in a way where a new feature appears and is enforced, then they develop the training material for that new feature. What happens is that the total product or solution, e.g. SharePoint, then lacks overall introduction in terms of training. There should be a balance between the introduction of the tool and the introduction of the new feature. They should have comprehensive introductory courses for both Office 365 and SharePoint, instead of needing to Google for particular situations. I'm trying to get the knowledge bit by bit, so I'm losing the idea of the whole product, e.g. SharePoint is losing its essence. To get onboarded to any new product, it's important to get a good introduction into that product.

I've been using SharePoint since 2006, so I've seen its "many flavors".

I find SharePoint to be stable. No complaints there.

I have no complaints about the scalability of SharePoint.

The support system for SharePoint works pretty well. We had a complicated situation about the reasoning why tenants and users are limited in terms of functionality, and the escalation and resolving of that issue, of that situation, went pretty fast, even for experimental features. It was quite straightforward to get access to experimental features, or find out why this access is limited, then fix it. I'm happy with the technical support for SharePoint.

The initial setup of SharePoint is very straightforward. Microsoft did a very good job with onboarding new users of their platform, e.g. the Office 365 platform. There were a lot of good improvements for administrators of tenants of different parts of Office 365, including SharePoint.

We implemented SharePoint through our in-house team, because we are a technology company, so we didn't need to use external experts or specialists for the deployment of the platform.

I'm using SharePoint as part of Office 365, using it as a part of Teams and under the hood of Teams, so yes, I'm still using SharePoint.

SharePoint is deployed on public cloud. We have some projects where SharePoint 2019 is deployed as a server, but those are based on an integrations app, but mostly it's on Office 365, e.g. SharePoint Online. Microsoft is the cloud provider we're using for the platform.

I want to highlight that some organic growth was missed with Teams, because there's still complicated switching between tenants, e.g. Teams and SharePoint users. In this case, Teams users may work in different organizations, or are guests of different tenants and different organizations. Switching between tenants, or the ability to streamline and organize identity management logging into the system, e.g. to the cloud, to Office 365 with one ID or organization ID should provide options to do work with many organizations at the same time.

Currently, there is still the need to switch from one organization to another, to get the full toolsets of a particular tenant, so for users, that's quite annoying. For one organization that fits, and that works fine for an organization with guest users, but when we have multi-tenant situations, when people are collaborating on different projects, and when initiated or hosted by different organizations, switching from one organization to another should be improved.

We have 40 to 50 users of SharePoint, and they are involved in various projects run by customers. We also add users from other organizations, so the total collaboration space may include 200 to 300 users.

My advice to people thinking about using SharePoint, the very important lessons I learned during years of using the tool, is for them not to fight with it, e.g. they should not start to use it based on what they initially wished to use it for. It's best to first spend more time in getting a better understanding of the tool and its relevant capabilities. Learn SharePoint first. Spend time learning it.

I would give SharePoint a rating of nine out of ten.

I use this solution for storing documents. It is a single sign-on with the identity system and so it will sign me on and I will upload, download some document, and share it with my colleagues at work.

It has helped us with storing all the documents, which means that people are not going to intervene. There is a way of extracting knowledge within documentation and tracking it. There are knowledge assets for where documentation is stored, indexed, and searchable through SharePoint. I think this represents the collective knowledge, which is highly valuable.

Search can be improved a lot because we are always trying to compare it with Google Search. Beyond that, it would be helpful to tag the documents.

It is stable.

I was not personally involved with the setup. My IT team did this.

When I am choosing a product, I think of the quality of service, economy of sale, licensing, implementation, the skill set of documentation, SaaS availability, and skill set. These are the constellations in mind when I'm choosing a product.

I think SharePoint can definitely look at taking it to the next level of customer experience. It's not about how jazzy it looks and so on but it's more of how intuitive it is and how it can basically enable a user-friendly experience. When downloading a document, ask yourself how can you enable it? How can you enable some kind of a decision tree, and how can you have some kind of a bot in there which can do some assistance for the customer who was supposedly struggling to find the document, or is not able to find what to search. The bot can intervene and help the user with some alternate keywords and to clearly define what the user is looking for. Those kinds of things should be the next addition to SharePoint.

• 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.

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.

Some valuable features are:

• The SharePoint document management is second to none. This was one of our main reasons to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to 2013.
• SharePoint 2013 had a better and cleaner user interface that has appealed to more users.
• The improved out-of-the-box Search functionality, was also a driving factor in migrating to SharePoint 2013.

With the cleaner and friendlier user interface, we have managed to assign access requests back to the users. While our support desk dealt with these requests previously, we have now managed to easily train managers in each team/department to provide access requests easily, thus reducing the load on our support desk.

The areas in which this product can improve are:

• The user experience can be simplified a bit more.
• The performance and customizability can also be improved.

I have used this product for 12 months.

There were no major stability issues as such, but the user profile service stopped unexpectedly on a few occasions.

No issues were experienced in regards to the scalability.

Being a Microsoft product that is widely used around the world, the technical support is easily available.

The only problem is when there is any customization done to the default SharePoint tool.

We used the older version, Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Our reason to upgrade was Microsoft decided to stop its support for SharePoint 2010 aand also because our license was soon going to expire.

For someone who had not set up SharePoint previously, the initial setup was somewhat complicating. However, it became very straightforward thereafter.

The pricing and licensing is one of the most crucial parts of using Microsoft SharePoint.

Confluence by Atlassian was the only other option that was considered.

In the end, we chose the Microsoft SharePoint solution because we have a Microsoft Gold membership; so the pricing and licensing was greatly reduced for us.

Try and stick to a vanilla installation/setup as much as possible. When branding your instance of SharePoint, also try not to implement too much of custom codes. The more custom codes you implement, the less maintainable and less migratable SharePoint becomes.

Team place where sharing of documents and co-editing occurs.

Ease of access to shared documents.

Co-editing of documents. This enables teams to work on the same document and the work gets done faster.

Search integration across SharePoint, Yammer, Teams, and OneDrive.

It's good but we are not using a lot of load in the system.

It's the look and feel and maybe the integration with the Office platform.

Basically, it's just for internet and communication. It's not a busy implementation.

We need the storage of the files, the documents right now are in the database. Maybe SharePoint has to improve the capability to store the information in file systems. In theory right now, it could do that. But, I understand that some functions are lost when you store the information in a file system, so maybe that's a way SharePoint can improve.

It is very stable. But, I think it depends on the infrastructure. 

It's scalable because you can add more and more SharePoint's installations and maybe you can divide the content and everything, so it's scalable.

We have not yet had a need to contact tech support.