Despite being commonly used for large enterprises, SharePoint does small and simple best
Updated June 17, 2021
Despite being commonly used for large enterprises, SharePoint does small and simple best
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint
SharePoint is used by my organization to store and organize team and department files. Various departments send SharePoint links in order to share files with each other. Our IT department also uses it to submit and track help tickets for employees. It is also used for the storage and organization of proposals and contracts.
- It can store a wealth of information that is accessible by users across an organization, assuming the content is organized and people know what they are looking for.
- It has fairly robust privacy controls for blocking access by certain users or groups to different pages of the site.
- It keeps good records of document authors and when a document was last edited, and these details are always in plain view.
- There is no good built-in system of version tracking besides file names that users give to documents, which are often inconsistent or entirely inaccurate.
- The interface is visually cluttered and not very intuitive to navigate. There are many nested menus and no visual distinctions between different sections of the platform unless you program them in yourself.
- It relies on users to input a ton of manual metadata for searching purposes, which leads to issues when users are not consistent in their naming conventions. The system quickly becomes a mess when everything is a free text field instead of a set of choices for users to pick from.
- SharePoint has contributed to the lack of accountability at our organization because it contains no real way to police user habits at a large, global organization. Some departments use it, some don't. Some teams use it, some don't. And those who do use it are notoriously inconsistent in their implementation of its capabilities. In the past we have tried to streamline the system and make it more efficient for people to use, but we have now actually abandoned this in favor of moving to an ERP system instead.
- SharePoint has caused a lot of headache and duplication of efforts across our organization, and the time and money we have sunk into attempting to shoehorn better processes into it has not been worth it in the long run.
- One plus is that it has provided a place for large amounts of data to be stored, so at least we can transfer all that content out of the system when we move to an ERP model. After we fix all the taxonomy issues, of course.
SharePoint Feature Ratings
Using MS SharePoint
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Technical support not required | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome |
- Requesting access to a page from its owner
- Tagging content with metadata
- Version control
- Searching for a particular document in a sea of content
Yes, but I don't use it