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SharePoint - To Collaborate or Not to Collaborate
July 20, 2016

SharePoint - To Collaborate or Not to Collaborate

John Glenn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint

Currently we have Office 365 which came with SharePoint for our organization. We have started using it for the easy to set up and use document collaboration. It isn't quite as easy to use as you might think though. Once the initial setup is configured properly the system is very easy to use and addresses multiple issues we have had in the past. One of the biggest issues we had with sharing documents revolved around the needless sending of emails back and forth with attachments for every file revision. While a network share does rectify this, it is only viable when all collaborators are actually part of your network.
  • The site creation is about as out of the box as you can get without actually putting your content into it. This is a big time savings for us in that we don't have to create a site from scratch.
  • The logic is built in and familiar. Since we are already using OneDrive for Business this was an easy transition for our users to understand.
  • One of my favorite features that SharePoint does well is that the permissions are fairly easy to understand even when you are granting access to people outside of your organization.
  • The public website creation documentation is shaky at best. I would highly reccommend using Google for better answers from actual users rather than rely on the MS docs.
  • Another grey area for SharePoint is that the editing tools are fairly limited when it comes to using them on the web for documentation.
  • I think SharePoint is a great tool for collaboration of data that is manipulated for many users but when you only need to share a file for one person to edit then the need is diminished and basic website would be much easier to navigate.
  • Since this was a part of our Office 365 subscription it was more of a bonus for us. The biggest ROI is that we are now able to transfer this work from email to a website.
  • It has given us the ability to allow outside collaborators to quickly see and make changes to the overall flow of work in each department.
  • Our users love the ability to feel safe that their collaborated work is safe and secure and that even if there are changes made on accident they will not have to start over. It's also a much more visual way to see the changes and who made them for accountability.
  • CMS
Obviously we still use our CMS to manage our main websites but with SharePoint we no longer have to rely on one or two key employees to post the work that many have done. We also now have a central location for all of these files to be viewed and posted once they are made public. The idea here is that we can pool resources together and not have to worry if the one person who knows CMS is on sick leave, or even worse, permanent leave to get the work completed.
One of the best use cases for SharePoint is for a document repository on the web where multiple users, in and out, of a corporate network need access to edit and view specific documents. We have bi-annual meetings and throughout the year users place documents on the SharePoint site. Once the first round of documents are posted we can then share them out for other program areas to add and change. SharePoint is perfect for this because all of the changes are tracked and can be reverted to avoid costly mistakes or even loss of the document.

We tried to use SharePoint as a distribution site for several non-changing informational documents and the end result was that we wasted a lot of time posting these through SharePoint without the need for any collaboration. Basically we spent more time making SharePoint fit our needs for something that was best suited for our traditional website.

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