SharePoint for Document and Approval Management
February 01, 2018
SharePoint for Document and Approval Management
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint is being used across our Americas Division by a number of departments including Engineering, HR, Payroll, Finance, Customer Service, and Technical Support. The scope of how we used varies from department to department, but we mainly use SharePoint for document management and workflow approvals via the use of out of the box workflows and a 3rd party add-on called NINTEX Workflow.
SharePoint helped us digitize our approvals that were done via pen and paper or by email; with the use of SharePoint we were able to cut down the amount of time it takes our approvals to be completed.
- SharePoint Workflows are one of the most useful features that can be used; setting up approval workflows is relatively easy for any user.
- Another example of what SharePoint does well is the ability for admins and power users easily architecture the security structure of the SharePoint Site Collections. The access permissions can be setup in a way where there can be several sub sites and even document libraries that only specific users have access to.
- Creating document libraries is another aspect that SharePoint does very well; users can use the "Open with Explorer" feature to start creating the document libraries which resembles how folders are created in Windows.
- One improvement we would recommend is to make SharePoint work in all browsers; at the moment it only works well in a browser that has ActiveX.
- Implementing a Visio like user interface for creating out of the box workflows would be a great feature.
- Removing the needed local client configurations such as having the site URL in "Trusted Sites" and the need to run WebClient Service would improve the ease of use of SharePoint.
- SharePoint had positive impact by finally providing the business with a central location for file storing that always has the most current version of the file.
- Another positive impact SharePoint had is that it took approvals that used to take 2-3 months to 2-3 weeks.
- Using SharePoint in achieving our ISO 9000 is another example of positive ROI for the business.
- Box
We compared SharePoint with Box.com, but decided to go with SharePoint since Box.com did not have as many features we needed. Some of the features our business needed is the ability to architecture security folders structure with ability to limit users access. We also had the need to create approval workflows which Box did not have at the time.