My SharePoint Review
Updated December 04, 2014

My SharePoint Review

Alberto da Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint

SharePoint is used in my company in three different ways. We first started using SharePoint in order to create a Business Intelligence Portal, through the use of this portal we display Scorecards and KPIs that assist management in making educated decisions as to which indicators are doing well and which ones need to be reviewed.
Another way that we use SharePoint is to create applications with the assistance of InfoPath, Nintex (workflows) and SQL Reporting Services (reports). Our Capital Budget has been done through the last three years through one of these applications.
Finally we have also created collaboration sites for the different internal departments that allows them to share information and documents with each other.

Pros

  • Applications using a combination of SharePoint, InfoPath, Nintex & SQL Reporting Services. By utilizing these technologies you can develop rich web applications in a much shorter span of time than it would take to create it with .Net.
  • SQL Reporting Services, Performance Points with SharePoint is a great way to create Business Intelligence. You can create dynamic drill down scorecards that will assist staff in making faster educated decisions.
  • SharePoint with Nintex are able to create rich workflows that will greatly assist in business processes.

Cons

  • Site customization in SharePoint is not a straight forward as ASP.Net sites for example. SharePoint in my opinion is a great functional tool but if the scope of management is to have a site or application where design is a key feature than I'm not sure SharePoint is the best option. SharePoint 2013 has greatly improved on the look and feel but to me is a great functional tool but has limitations on design. So it depends on the focus of the company, if design is more important than functionality than I would avoid SharePoint but if the company is looking for a good looking great functional tool than SharePoint would be my option.
  • Creating Visual Webparts for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2012 is still a challenge because the developer needs to have SharePoint installed on the machine that Visual Studio is running on. This can be quite cumbersome, the best option would be to have developers being able to create and test the webpart on their machines without having to install SharePoint first.
  • In the past Capital Budget was a slow process that required lots of emails going back and forth. With the creation of the Operating Plan Portal, managers can submit their capital requests in a fast and efficient way for high management to approve/reject.
  • With the creation of our Business Intelligence portal management can look at the Scorecard & KPIs and make fast educated decisions as to which departments/indicators needs improvement.
  • In the past all of our files that require collaboration were stored on shared drives. With SharePoint that is no longer the case, each department have their own portal where they can share and controll access to the files themselves.
DropBox is a nice application for document sharing but does not have many of the features such as workflows. With SharePoint you can send approval workflows for individuals files that are uploaded by the users.
Both Blogger and WordPress are nice quick out of the box solutions, but is not as scalable as SharePoint is. With SharePoint for example you can create webparts, workflows, document level security where with the previous other solutions would be harder and more expensive to implement.
In summary SharePoint provides a company with the ability to better adapt to ever changing business needs than the other ones.
To me SharePoint is the most complete technology out there for business needs as it includes:
- Business Intelligence
- Electronic Forms
- Collaboration Sites
- Blogs
- etc...

Blogger for example may individually do blogging better than SharePoint but does not have all the other features that SharePoint has such as BI. SharePoint to me is the best choice as it does many features really well where other technology may do something specific better but is restricted to that feature only.
- Which processes in your company currently needs improvements. What are the strength and weakness of your company/department?
- Are you looking for a quick out of the box solution or something that can be customized as per business needs?
- Is the scope of the solutions more in line with company or specific departments?
- How large are your typical projects?
- Is the level of collaboration on the different projects internal only or do they need to collaborate with external users as well?
- What is the history of IT investment in your company?

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