Microsoft SharePoint

Avantages

I was part of the team with the Oregon Department of Administration in the creation of their employee intranet built with SharePoint.

It was an easy transition for me to learn SharePoint for the following reasons:

Combined with previous knowledge of HTML, my familiarity with Microsoft products made it easy for me to learn SharePoint. With two day's of formal training, I was able to get up to speed in virtually no time.

SharePoint has a wide variety of pre-built modules out of the box from which developers can select.

One very pleasing aspect of the finished project was that the end-users came on board and operated their new employee website with ease and productivity.

It gives the State employees a place both for resources for knowledge of government procedures and a marketing platform to promote their office to the rest of the department.

It gives them a place for teams to streamline their workflow within each office and work together as virtual teams to enhance their digital processes.

It gives each office an opportunity to individualize their space on the intranet to show their office's competencies and assets.

As I am a designer at heart, SharePoint gave me the opportunity to express my creativity through the interpretation and development of each module to fit the end-user.

Inconvénients

If you have the experience ( a background with Microsoft products), it's easy to learn SharePoint. If not, it can be a bit trickier in that the HTML coding is sufficiently different within SharePoint that it can lead to confusion. I found this easy to overcome, but some might not and that is a consideration when selecting software.

Avantages

It's quite powerful, but like most of Microsoft products, it sometimes feels like it has too many available features and it's easy to get lost.

The main thing we liked about SharePoint was the documents, search, and web site options. Our goal was to recreate our corporate website, where people (Chamber members) can upload various documents, for example, application to become a member, and the files would automatically save in the required folder, where the staff can easily access it without having to resave it from emails.

Inconvénients

It's certainly not the easiest thing to use. We had a corporate Microsoft 360 account, and so we decided to use SharePoint for the corporate collaboration for documents and then went for a website. I can't say it was a disaster, but it was definitely not something that was the most user-friendly interface.

Avantages

SharePoint allows you to share one document with multiple employees, so when you have a document that needs to be reviewed and edits by multiple people (which is nearly every document we put out) the software is invaluable. I believe it is up to 9 people at a time can be in a document editing. And the software saves previous versions, so nothing is ever lost.

Inconvénients

This may be only a problem with my company, however, the SharePoint Administrator has to set up your "site" for you and if you want to allow others to view your site or share documents, you have to call the administrator and request they provide access to another user. But naturally this doesn't happen quickly, it generally takes a few days. At which point you have become frustrated and save the document to your computer and emailed it out to everyone, eliminating the need for SharePoint. If I am honest, the process is so frustrating, my company has had SharePoint for over 3 years, and very few have actually adopted it, because functionality at least at our company is very lacking. It doesn't make sense that I would have to get approval everytime I want to save a document.

Avantages

I like that SharePoint is a tool for everyone, whether it be professional web developers, or a casual computer user, it makes the creation of websites easily and accesible to anyone.
If you have access to an Microsoft Office license (or Office 365) then you are all set up to build websites with SharePoint, you only need a computer and access to the Internet.
As the name implies, the created website is a point to share with you organization, files, resources, media, ... You can also share sites, create group sites.
Another nice feature is that it has version control of everything in the website.

Inconvénients

SharePoint has a lot of useful features, but maybe the website is not easily customized by a professional web developer who would like to add more functionality.

Avantages

SharePoint allows you to easily create team or communication sites to collaborate with organization and document management. A communication site allows you to create and share content to a large group of users and options are customizable. Sites are convenient, flexible, easy to manage and you are able to create a document folder, notebooks, designs. Libraries are easily synchronized with mobile or your computer. Easily drag and drop new files to the library and keeps files in sync. You are able to customize documents view to only show some data and easily sort and search for specific fields.

Inconvénients

There’s no free version however SharePoint comes with Office 365. There’s a little bit of a learning curve with the software. There are not too many negatives about this software, it's very intuitive, user friendly. It would be great to be able to try SharePoint for 30 days, there's only a free month trial with Office 365.

Avantages

It is easy to browse different folders of data. It is also easy to access previous versions of a file. It is possible to get a link to an item like, say, "Quality Policy.docx" and it is possible to get a link to a specific version of that item.

Inconvénients

Configuring how SharePoint looks (my own file icon or site icon?), configuring the "process flow" of items (do I need a "proposal" state between "draft" and "approved") and getting the access rights working seemed to be something that requires a whole IT department to look after.

SharePoint makes the assumption that you check out a file, make edits and save a new version. It does not work so well when you e.g. copy the file to your laptop, edit offline and want to save a new version. Quite often we would receive files from subcontractors where the document name was not consistent with the previous version. Now do I go and edit the subcontractor's file to make it compliant or do I ignore the formalities and just store it as the next version.

Avantages

If I talk about pros, I would say it is an outstanding platform that let us share documentation as well as important information securely with others which further can be easily accessed anytime and anywhere. It helps us in saving our valuable time. Another appreciable feature is its ability of letting us customize each app according to our requirements in order to meet our business needs in most reliable ways.

Inconvénients

This is no doubt the most powerful and effective software but the only limitations is that it seems to be difficult in the beginning but soon after having experience and training with this tool, it becomes easier for the users. However, I am contented with this tool because of its uncountable benefits and ease of sharing information.

Avantages

SharePoint came on board originally to allow companies to have a centralized solution for the entire company to manage internal documents, policies, and everything in between that needed to be shared with employees. This allowed everyone to have a secure access point from which they can access any document that was needed to run the company. Now it even allows for company websites to be published so that user's can get access to the information more readily.

Inconvénients

The SharePoint that exists now is so awesome compared to when it first began. So I cannot truly say that I dislike anything about it at this point.

Avantages

The entire suite of Microsoft tools are pretty well integrated with one another. They have "web parts" that make building the sites slightly easier and "prettier".

Inconvénients

It's nice having the entire Microsoft suite integrated together, but trying to piece it all together with SharePoint is the most confusing and complicated thing I have ever encountered. Large companies that use SharePoint typically have teams dedicated to administering SharePoint sites. For a "regular" person to try and figure it out in addition to their "normal" work, they'll find themselves so innundated with trying to do website building instead of actually doing the work that needs to be done. I don't see how SharePoint provides any financial return on investing whatsoever. If you are a small business and you want an intranet site, then you are much better off going with Confluence. Heck, just use the OneNote that you already have access to and just treat each "notebook" as a team/project page.

Avantages

Writing about its pros, I would say SharePoint helps us a lot in sharing large number of files as well as projects with others. I like its accessibility from any device. Additionally SharePoint allow users to upload files easily. I like its great support and outstanding cloud storage. The most fascinating thing about it is that it is extremely easy to set up and customize.

Inconvénients

Truly speaking I failed to find any downsides of this awesome product. It runs so smoothly and I never come across any hindrance while using this product. It is loaded with wonderful interesting as well as useful features. There is not even a single thing to dislike about.

Avantages

SharePoint allows you to share documents and collaborate on those documents with colleagues. There are extensive options for setting permissions on SharePoint so that specific users/groups can access/modify documents/pages/sites. SharePoint is an enterprise solution, so your entire organization is able to benefit from a secure, shared environment.

Inconvénients

Depending upon what you want to do, SharePoint can be a challenge to set up. Granted, SharePoint does give you the option of setting up templates for your pages, but if that capability is turned off by your network policies, creating new pages can be very slow and manually intensive. Although adding users/groups to permissions is relatively "simple", it is also somewhat roundabout. If you have your pages set up to be very secure, you practically need to be a site admin just to add a user's permissions.

Out of the entire lineup of software created by Microsoft, SharePoint is by far my least favorite software to us. It will do the job, but can take some time to get it done.

Avantages

In past corporate jobs SharePoint was a centerpiece to the companies internal social media, information sharing, structure. I liked it as a resource, but didn't love it for it was. It just ok in my book and I used it because someone somewhere in the corporate structure picked it... rather saw it was included in a product suite they already bought and implemented it because it was money already spent.

Inconvénients

It has the worst search feature ever. I cant tell you how many times I would do a search for an answer to something only to be provided with a "0 results found" or worse a list of powerpoints, pdfs, and other nonsense that someone shared.

Avantages

What I really like is that SharePoint is really easy to use - especially from a normal user perspective. It provides key functionalities which makes it preferred choice of many organisations. Collaboration between colleagues is made so easy.

Inconvénients

SharePoint implementation price could vary according to the customization desired. I have also heard from admin users that it's not that great tool to maintain. Also the search is not one of its strongest qualities.

Avantages

I like that has become a tool very easy-to-use and friendly. I remember 15 years ago when I started working that Sharepoint was someting new to me and quite not flexible. Now the music has totally changed! Easy to invite people to collaborate and keep track on documents changes

Inconvénients

I have found some difficulties in getting people outside of the organization to collaborate on the tool. In the end, it was something related to company settings, but it took me a while to figure it out

Avantages

SharePoint as a hosted service helped us achieve some specific productivity goals, which was to find a service that provides us with the ability to segment our various company documents and files (as a group of companies) and integrates well with our existing productivity software (Windows PCs all running Microsoft Office Suite) and is ideally web-based with little overhead to set up and is very scalable, with a lot of flexibility for user access controls. It really hit all the checkmarks for us and has been in place since 2013.

Inconvénients

There was a learning curve and required us to provide some internal training to ensure staff understood the functions and limitations of the system and also required some processes and procedures were documented for future reference as to how the system was set up. It is quite a deep system and as a result is quite flexible, but you need a good administrator to make sure it's working for you and not against you.

Avantages

Being able to capture lots of detailed notes about IT Help Desk problem tickets was much easier with MS SharePoint than other products I've tried. I'm writing from an end user perspective, not an adminstrator. It was very easy to reassign tickets to others to help pursue or reassign back with very detailed technical notes internal to the support staff...without running out of space.

Inconvénients

It would have been great to have had more than just a plain query for which tickets are in which status...some reporting/graphing capability to show how many tickets get resolved, how often and which tickets have aged past certain limits. For a product that has been on the market multiple decades, it should have better reporting capability by now.

Avantages

Share Point integrates many features that facilitate the interdepartmental work of companies, allowing immediate availability of documents, files and other resources thanks to the way in which this environment synchronizes libraries. There is a wide range of customization options, it has a high level of security and integrates them with Microsoft packages. Maximizes the efficiency and performance of teamwork, significantly minimizes the use of printed documents as well as the need to send them by email

Inconvénients

I recommend that you start with a trial version before you get the product to see if it meets your requirements. It requires a consultant or a certified person to take advantage of all the benefits of Share Point. In some cases, depending on the configuration, it is a little tedious to find the files that are needed and the navigation within the interface must be improved a lot

Avantages

There are hundreds of benefits of SharePoint. One of the pros is that it provides us incredibly easy ways to share documents and valuable information with others. It has made searching of documents extremely easy. It offers great customer support. It is super easy to learn use and customize.

Inconvénients

There are plenty of benefits of this product. I am not having any complains about it. It is perfect from every angle. I feel comfortable to use this. I am completely satisfied with it.

Avantages

Sharepoint is the easiest way of sharing files. It enables users to share large documents as well as spreadsheets conveniently to others. Another biggest advantage is that its' layout is really very easy and not tough like other products. Furthermore it is the most reliable way for storing important documents that saves our precious time.

Inconvénients

I really feel happy and comfortable to use this product. It is absolutely user friendly. So I just love to use this. It is a flawless product.

Avantages

As the name indicates, it is a sharing platform with secured access. The administrator should give the user provision before a user can access the folder. We use this in Office 365 environment and it's easy and cool to collaborate with the people in the organization at all levels.

Inconvénients

At the moment, I can only comment on the slow response rate when loading and opening a files. It really takes time especially when the file is large.

Avantages

The best thing about Sharepoint is that folder/file URLs follow the same format as the folder hierarchy, so it is very easy to modify links when you are including many links in an email or reference document. It's also great at managing small databases. I also found it useful that you could "lock" a file for editing to ensure versions did not become corrupted by multiple users working on the file at the same time.

Inconvénients

It was a bit challening to learn how to use Sharepoint, but our department did successfully move all our files over to Sharepoint and had 100% Sharepoint saving within a few years of adoption. Other teams did not make the transition very quickly though.

Avantages

I liked that I can purpose Sharepoint as an Issue Tracking System for our Projects, along with simply organizing it as a place where important documentation was stored for other team members to see and modify. The integration with Microsoft suite made it perfect to simply open on Microsoft software and have the convenience of the saving of the document to be automatically uploaded on the sharepoint without having to reupload again.

Inconvénients

You have to tailor it best for your project, so lots of customization involved depending on what your needs are can eat up a lot of your time. The search function I find is not as great as it can be, although I do like being able to search according to types of files (excel, ppt, etc).

Avantages

The latest version of SharePoint is faster with similar functionality of its past lineage. Team sites are modernize with the latest web UI and graphics.

Inconvénients

If you are a coder and use CSS or master pages, customization is limited. You will need to utilize site themes and Modern UI for custom branding.

Avantages

It’s a good software for web based storage, desktop sharing viewing, instant messaging. Users could upload, share files, add event calendars. Good tool for storing and uploading multiple files. Perfect tool if you’re just looking to manage multiple files. You may add graphics to pages. The calendar tool helps to organize meetings, vacations, conferences.

Inconvénients

I feel like there are other options that offer similar and more advanced features. There’s a learning curve at first. More of an old school tool, takes time to learn how to utilize functions and not very attractive software as far as design.

Avantages

incorporates functionalities and new ways to share and work with other people, helping you improve the productivity of your organization, manage a space where the people of your company can discuss socially in the style of Facebook with some additional features and offers a personalized search experience where you can adjust and get more accurate results.

Inconvénients

It has a restricted administration that can be a problem for special configurations such as file upload size and is a bit slow