Microsoft SharePoint vs. Salesforce CRM Analytics vs. Tableau Desktop

SharePoint Document Management excels as a central repository for storing, organising, and retrieving documents. It supports version control, metadata tagging, secure access, and integration with tools like Power Automate. At our organisation, it's used for managing contracts, policies, and supplier documents. SharePoint Workflow Automation integrates with Power Automate to streamline approvals, gather feedback, and automate recurring tasks. This reduces reliance on email chains and manual trackers.

Incentivized

For us it really comes down to that book management and next best contact for our advisors. When we're thinking about a book of business that may range, depending on the advisor, from 400 clients to a thousand clients, how do they really optimize their time? Who do they call next? Who do they work with to make sure not only they're keeping those clients engaged, they're not leaving the firm going to other advisors who they haven't talked to in a while who might need their attention. That's really where that CRM analytics is really proven pretty powerful for us.

Incentivized

The best scenario is definitely to collect data from several sources and create dedicated dashboards for specific recipients. However, I miss the possibility of explaining these reports in more detail. Sometimes, we order a report, and after half a year, we don't remember the meaning of some data (I know it's our fault as an organization, but the tool could force better practices).

Incentivized

• We track employees' performance sheets, which are accessible to the employee, his manager, and HR, and this helps with transparency.
• We maintain technical process documents and SOPs, which help us quickly provide relevant documents during audits.
• We maintain incident documents change request forms in SharePoint, which helps us in tracking the changes.

Incentivized

• Interactive Dashboards, it [consists] of wide variety of charts
• Data from different sources can be easily integrated with it
• Security, it provides easy way to secure and share the information with the users
• Support actions like opening hyperlink etc
• Almost everything can be done from configuration
• Data can easily be managed from dataflow.

Incentivized

• An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
• Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.

Incentivized

• Windows Explorer users have some difficulty having to constantly UPLOAD / DOWNLOAD files. Specifically on the DOWNLOAD when they are used to Drag & Drop in & out of LOCAL folders via Window's explorer.
• Microsoft SharePoint supports multiple "library" types. When implementing our "image" library the search function is done via "tags" and boolean logic. This is challenging to most end users. I'd like our users to be able to search our Microsoft SharePoint image library without having to enter KEYWORD or other BOOLEAN logic.
• Microsoft SharePoint can also be an internal website for each department or company wide communication tool but I believe these features are geared for much larger organizations. Since we are a SMB we really aren't using these features. So maybe something more useful to SMBs would be nice.

Incentivized

• Implementation takes time and resources. It is a heavy lift to implement and at first, it can take a little bit of time to understand what you are looking at. But once it's implemented it's easy to get started.
• Without any BI expertise or resources available to your organization, the implementation of this is difficult. If you aren't used to BI tools and don't have an expert in house, the terminology can be difficult to understand at first.
• Their support is not on hand to help you if you encounter any issues, at least not on all the plans or the basic plans. Real-time support service is an add-on, so you'll need to be patient if you require help or pay extra money.
• More functionality for the tool is needed to compete with other heavyweights in the arena like Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy. Still lacks the robustness, functionality, and flexibility other competing products possess.

Incentivized

• Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
• Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
• Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered

It's integral to our business. It's already included with most of the Office 365 licensing we buy, so the cost is effectively zero. It stores our files, it is the foundation for custom applications, and Microsoft only continues to enhance its functionality and its connections to other Microsoft tools. SharePoint just keeps getting better and better.

Incentivized

Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.

Incentivized

No usability issues reported. Individual teams also have allocated areas which replace legacy shared drives on local LANs. Access to Sharepoint resources is fully integrated with corporate Active Directory with additional two-factor authentication required for administrative users. Users have access to Microsoft Services Hub which allows you to create, manage, and track support requests while staying current on Microsoft technologies with access to select self-paced learning paths

Incentivized

For someone who don't have coding background, this could be a useful tool and fairly easy to learn and use given the good support. However, if you know other open source tools, it would be much easier to use the other tools and the knowledge is more transferable in the future.

Incentivized

Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.

When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.

Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast

Incentivized

Support for SharePoint is quite good. Microsoft provides good support. Microsoft offers

• Quick turnaround time for issues
• A range of support services
• Access to a network of resources
• Escalation of issues
• Ongoing development and commitment to produce enhancement

The majority of support is required for initial installation. Once complete and the system is operating we have had very few support issues.

Incentivized

I was not able to be in interaction much with Salesforce support team since every feature works the way it should be working. So far I have not experienced any bug or major glitches that would delay the result of my work and performance. There is also a hotline in our company for Salesforce issue but so far I have not used it.

Incentivized

Tableau support has been extremely responsive and willing to help with all of our requests. They have assisted with creating advanced analysis and many different types of custom icons, data formatting, formulas, and actions embedded into graphs. Tableau offers a weekly presentation of features and assists with internal company projects.

Incentivized

The face to face training I received was on SharePoint Administration. It was rushed as there was a lot of information to cover and the application of the labs weren't that great either. I like to be able to relate what I am learning to what I am currently doing.

It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.

I like to learn at my own pace and online training allows for that. Additionally, you can skip through pieces of content that you already know or are already comfortable with. Microsoft actually offers great videos on their website for basic fundamental SharePoint Training. I have used these training videos in some of my own training sessions with end users.

I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems

Incentivized

Planning to the last detail would be advised. SharePoint is a very large application that takes a lot of finesse to get operational

An implementation partner would certainly result in greater output in a more efficient amount of time. However, I have found implementation partners to be extremely expensive for the output received (at least working for a non-profit company they are frequently unaffordable). Internal implementation does help with usable output though since internal knowledge would better know the data architecture and business processes

Incentivized

Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.

Incentivized

The reasons for selecting MS SharePoint are: SharePoint provides ease of use and web design assistance and support SharePoint helps you schedule your content for publishing. enables users to share documents with external parties and offers a better internal structure of the content and better indexing and searching capabilities.

Incentivized

Tableau is the absolute top of the class when it comes to business intelligence, but it doesn't make sense for every business case. In our case, we needed a simple data visualization platform for our CRM platform and sales pipeline. Salesforce Analytics, while nowhere near as robust, did the job we needed it to do perfectly in a significantly more cost-effective manner.

Incentivized

I have used Power BI as well, the pricing is better, and also training costs or certifications are not that high. Since there is python integration in Power BI where I can use data cleaning and visualizing libraries and also some machine learning models. I can import my python scripts and create a visualization on processed data.

Incentivized

Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.

• It comes with Office 365. It won't cost you any additional charges.
• It will help you to streamline your communication and work as a central hub for all tasks, files[,] and events[.]
• Setting it up will need a bit [of] planning. If you jump blindly it will become a confusing place for your team members and make them frustrated[.]

Incentivized

• I would say it's been positive just because as a company, anyone that has access to it can go in there and pull any company information and we're very up to date then on all of our client base. So I would say it's been a very positive impact.

Incentivized

• Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
• Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
• Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.

Incentivized