Item: Microsoft SharePoint
Rating: 8
Author: Julianna Beaver

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The entire company that I work for uses MS SharePoint. It is a great collaboration tool and is nice to have a central hub for common documents, announcements, etc. We have one central location where you can access all the SharePoints throughout the company and it is helpful when first joining or just working with a new team. Most teams across the organization use the tool and more and more are adopting it.

Pros and Cons

It is easy to use and you can be simple or do advanced coding
It has a document library that you can use similar to a shared drive, but it also monitors when updates were made and only allows a single user to edit at one particular time
It allows you to create different user groups with varying levels of permissions

If you want to make it look extra nice, you need coding experience and it's very hard to add that nice extra touch without it
I wish that they had more templates to build off of when first creating it
I am never able to open it in Chrome and IE is very slow on this website causing sessions to time out quickly

Return on Investment

We are able to save time by having a repository of documents in one central location instead of them all being shared individually.
We are able to store secure documents and monitor edits due to the advanced security features
It causes people to branch out and learn some new web designing tools loosely

Alternatives Considered

XWiki Collaboration Suite

MS SharePoint is light years ahead of Wiki in terms of functionality and collaboration. Wiki is outdated and does not have advanced features. The site also is just slower and does not have a sharp look like MS SharePoint does. I also know that it is easier to build out and get licenses for than Wiki.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 2016, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Connect

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a site to save any comment documents such as policies, legal documents, templates...the list goes on and on...this is the tool for you! Although coding experience would be helpful for advanced features, you can do everything you would need to do with the normal features that are already build in. If you have a team that needs access to different levels of documents, this is a great tool because of the permissions feature. However, if you are a very large company, you should think about how many of these sites you would like as it could get to the point where you could make too many.

Collaboration for the Organization Hackers!

Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint