Likelihood to Recommend It is very suitable for complete corporate BI solutions. If you see BI as embedding information into your organization and business processes, and thus as more than just a few scattered dashboards and reports, arcplan is your platform. It's less suitable for ad-hoc reporting and data discovery. It can do it (everything is possible), but there is strong competition in this area.
Read full review A simple and important scenario well suited is that you can configure alerts to notify you when the production server fails. another best feature is the report server is the central component of reporting services. For me something less appropriate is that the admin must ensure optimal performance for farm operations, they recommend that you install SQL Server on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications.
Read full review Pros Excellent dashboard. Well advanced BI metrics. Better interfacing to other DW. Read full review Flexible - able to make any changes we would like vs traditional service desk system. ROI - We were already using SharePoint for internal intranet, so we are simply getting more use out of licensing we had already committed to. Easy to use for end users. Read full review Cons Positioning and marketing. Most BI vendors use a non-technical sales strategy and focus on shiny, sexy dashboards to sell the story. In order to position arcplan fairly and correctly, the technical and business advantages need to be part of a sales story. So, it is not really an easy product to sell to customers, if it has to compete with now-to-wow-five-minute products. Learning/training for developers. It's easy to learn the basics of arcplan, because the interface is logical. But nothing prevents a beginning developer from creating a monstrous application, because there is no prescribed architecture. It really takes some experience to become a good arcplan architect. It's a disadvantage resulting from one of arcplan's biggest advantages. Data connectors: arcplan standard comes with a connector of your choice. Additional connectors need to be purchased separately. Many other products come with a full range of connectors. Read full review It is hard to setup and nightmare It requires a of infrastructure, thus it could be costly because of requirement and licensing required for everything to run smoothly If it is not setup and organized properly from the beginning it could be maintenance nightmare It is hard to have "test" environment to do patches or similar Read full review Likelihood to Renew This was a long-term buy-in from a corporate perspective, to remain in the SharePoint space. Migration is certainly possible, which is good for planning and having options further out. At this point, the only planned migration is to eventually move the architecture up to SharePoint/SQL 2013. At that point, we will be able to leverage some greater efficiencies, some enhanced content design and management features, and some more current social features. It is well worth a full consideration in any shop looking at a new implementation of or migration to SharePoint (although you will probably be considering 2013 versions or beyond in those discussions), but the platform should be a strong competitor to any alternatives. Realizing the capability of a fully-branded and customized website was not part of the original choice for the architecture at Lincoln, but seeing it implemented and functioning now with this capacity far beyond original expectations has certainly cemented plans to continue using it.
Read full review Usability SharePoint is very complex. This makes usability somewhat difficult from an IT perspective. An IT generalist will be able to pick it up and run with basic tasks. More customized functions would require significant specialized training and therefore limit what a standard user would be able to achieve. From an end user perspective, it's pretty straightforward to use.
Read full review Support Rating It's been fantastic in terms of Premier Support so far. If there is an issue and if you report if the product has an issue, they will act upon it immediately. In some cases, if you design/develop something using the platform, Microsoft appreciates it and... publishes it on their public website. But you have to wait for some time if it is a non-Premier Support issue as you may experience delays.
Read full review Implementation Rating Not implemented in best practice way, there are many customizations
Read full review Alternatives Considered Personally, I prefer
QlikView not because it's more stable but simply just for the looks of the dashboard. One of my clients in Sydney recently moved from arcplan to
QlikView . The reason was mainly looks and that
QlikView has more training materials for the support users to train with. So in all, it does not really stack well against
QlikView .
Read full review At the time of the two large projects, SharePoint was the enterprise solution so we were required to use that. We have since lobbied the enterprise teams to review and consider
Atlassian Confluence and were successful.
Confluence is cheaper than Sharepoint which is why we wanted to bring that in. The enterprise has now made
Confluence an enterprise solution as an alternative to SharePoint. After using both I think SharePoint has many more add-ins than
Confluence . It has much more customization ability than
Confluence . SharePoint is not good for mobile readiness.
Confluence is so there is a difference that might lead you to
Confluence over SharePoint. I would also say that SharePoint is very document-centric and that
Confluence has better KM than SharePoint does. even with the use of SQL Server. We were told that we could not use
Google Drive even though it had features we liked.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Return on Investment I've installed SharePoint in many different industries and each industry has seen greater collaboration among their teams both locally and nationally. The ability to collaborate more efficiently has reduced the need to have employees centrally located. Companies which have used SharePoint in a end user training portal have had great ROI, since they can create the content once and share with all their users who subscribe to their training service. The web content management aspect of SharePoint is a very helpful feature. Read full review ScreenShots