SharePoint - the intranet that you already have.
January 31, 2019
SharePoint - the intranet that you already have.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint
MS SharePoint is currently used as our intranet as a way to collaborate within and across units. It's available to everyone, but only power users are really using it. It has been used successfully as a document repository, and in a small way as a workflow management system with form routing. It's currently seen something we have, but don't really know how to use to its full potential.
- Coming bundled with other office products is really nice. Most people are going to need Outlook, Word, Excel - having access to SharePoint is nice to get with our site license.
- SharePoint is powerful. It can do a lot of things, and we haven't really even started to understand how it can be used.
- They've redesigned recently to make it easier to get started. You can make pages and add parts to the pages really easily. Going deeper takes a lot of trial and error.
- It's hard to know what all SharePoint does, or what it really excels at. People still use e-mail as their primary communication tool. They share OneDrive folders for document repositories. They keep notes in OneNote. SharePoint facilitates these tools but doesn't really add much direct value. Teams and Planner offer scaled-down versions that will probably see greater use because they are more focused.
- SharePoint is intimidating to get started with. There are a lot of settings and no clear entry point. Creating a new page and linking to that page is frustratingly difficult. Integration with other tools requires certain licenses and this isn't obvious. Permissions are confusing.
- SharePoint looks better now, but design is still lacking especially when you start getting behind the scenes.
- SharePoint is one of the most underused tools on campus, because no one is exactly sure how to use it. It has a lot of potential, but is too difficult and intimidating for non-technical users to do more than the basics.
- Microsoft hasn't distinguished SharePoint from Teams or other products very well. It's not clear if it'll be easier to just direct users there, and do the behind the scenes stuff in SharePoint. This makes communication with end users muddled.
- SharePoint is a bad place to communicate in real time, and Skype / Teams is much better positioned in this space. Teams is underwhelming and Skype for Business has it's issues - but they are designed with this goal in mind.
While SharePoint isn't as easy to use as Igloo or Squarespace, it comes bundled with Office 365 and drives the backend of those tools. I don't see SharePoint as a place people want to go and see stuff, but rather as a glue that supports all the other Office Products. If we get more in house expertise, then it could be a place that people manage work, but it's not used that way right now.