Item: Microsoft SharePoint
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SharePoint is our portal of information, all the news about the company (inside and outside) is spread on this platform. Besides that, we also use it to manage our client projects. For each client we have a project site, where we share our knowledge, documents, planning, issues, etc. SharePoint made all our work easier in finding the documentation, and it's easy to follow-up on projects when you have involved in a couple of them.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Content Management, as this is probably the most used feature on our intranet.
Easy integration between client applications
Document management in combination with search; it's a lot easier to find documents

Cons

Content types and different templates
Multilingual
Even better integration with Outlook, mail drag and drop

Return on Investment

Finding documents, we send less mails because we have alerting mechanism available
Social features (yammer / SharePoint) gave the communication in our organisation a big boost
Content types usage, you need good governance in place to let people know how they need to use the platform.

Alternatives Considered

Because we are a Microsoft partner, we had licenses available and this way we could quickly install this in our company. We started using SharePoint since the release of 2007.Other possibilities for us were custom development or another platform, but most of the times these other platforms don't have that much of out of the box functionality in comparison with SharePoint. If we had chosen custom development, we wouldn't have a intranet with this many features.

Likelihood to Renew

Currently we are in a migration process to SharePoint 2013. The Yammer integration and an even larger feature set made us switch to the new version. What we are experiencing right now is that people in our company are sharing even more on Yammer. We are very eager to launch our new intranet with complete Yammer integration.

Likelihood to Recommend

Depending of the size of company, I wouldn't use it for public websites. You have better products for this that have easier content management applications. If you have a couple of years experience with SharePoint, you can build almost everything with it. It gives you a couple of building blocks, like Lego, and if you use your imagination, the sky is the limit. But sometimes is best to check if there aren't other applications that can even do better for some functionalities you want to implement.

Comments

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Intranet based on SharePoint 2013 (coming from 2007)

Software Version