Likelihood to Recommend The product is especially useful when you have real-time and/or time series data to analyze. If you have more mundane, simpler requirements, other products might do the job you need for less money (there are even some decent open source visualization tools you can find.) I know the product is very widely used in capital markets applications to monitor and analyze risk and price and volume changes; if you're working in that area, I don't think there's a better tool to use.
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 Creating a basic model to extract data from a report is very easy. Advanced features like Calculated Fields and External Lookups allow you to augment the raw data. You can create a "project" to automate the data extraction. Combined with Datapump (a separate DW app), you can fully automate the process once the raw report is generated. 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 Recently, we had some major sticker-shock when we wanted to upgrade Data Pump. It is an exceptional product, but when the price jumped from $6,000 to over $60,000, it was impossible to get the funds approved internally for the upgrade. We also paid for yearly maintenance contracts which included Professional Services, but rarely found those services beneficial. However, we did receive all software upgrades for Datapump as part of the contract which we found to be very beneficial. However, with the new pricing, that is not longer the case. 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 Even though we do not utilize it on a daily basis, I do hope my current company renews it's license. If not, I intend to purchase myself.
Read full review 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 Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.
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 Data Pump reduces complexity of report solutions by offering a standardized approach for organizing and scheduling 97% service level for past 5 years for all of our jobs going through Data Pump Read full review 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 Altair Monarch Screenshots