SharePoint: Capable but could be made more user friendly
April 20, 2019

SharePoint: Capable but could be made more user friendly

Canh Tran | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint

SharePoint, when it was rolled out several years ago, was in replacement for Atlassian's Confluence. It is intended to be used by the whole organization, and was the de-facto tool for collaboration. There were a wide variety of uses for SharePoint. Teams were managing their own SharePoint sites to share internal information to the team, educate external teams, and make project-specific sites where all documentation and discussions related to a specific site were stored. Much more than a document repository, we have been using SharePoint as public and private wikis, calendar sharing, and data collection through generated forms for input.
  • Simple to use and learn the basics.
  • Lots of customization options if you require advanced features.
  • Tight integration with Microsoft software -- Excel data can be converted to charts, Outlook calendars.
  • Searching with a site is decent, as it will return results within documents such as Word uploaded in the repository.
  • The way permissions are configured can be difficult to control. I have seen permissions granted accidentally and give access to areas where they should not be.
  • Images for wiki pages are more difficult than necessary, as it requires you to first upload an image first before linking to it. It should work similarly to OneNote, where you can simply paste the image in.
  • Maintaining document folder structures is difficult. While there's a Windows Explorer-like function, it's not obvious where it can be found.
  • Relatively easy to share the basic features and functionality of SharePoint, and most users get the basic premise.
  • Difficult to convey more advanced features, requiring community forums and how-tos in order to educate. Most advanced features are not obvious in the tool itself and require searching through the internet.
  • Due to its slow adoption because of the overlap in the simple features, there have been hold-outs that continue to use Confluence (why change if the basic features work better in the old system) and there's been another option in the form of Google Suite, which our organization is also looking at as an option.
There are overlapping capabilities of SharePoint and the above list of products. The simplest form seems to be the Google Suite of products that provide cloud integration with document creation, such as Docs/Slides/Sheets/Forms where storage is in Drive. The cloud nature makes sharing to members of the organization easy and accessible outside of the corporate network. With the introduction of the Google products, our team and arguably the organization is less reliant on SharePoint due to its complexity in finding and using its advanced functions.
SharePoint is a powerful tool and has lots of advanced functionalities, but the learning curve for those advanced capabilities are not fully utilized when rolled out to the general user community in an organization as large as ours. I would say that in an organization as large as ours, the vast majority of the population is using 20% of the functionality. SharePoint could do a better job of simplifying the interface, catering to these beginner users. Confluence/Google have done a better job in this area. Because of this complex interface, most users view SharePoint as a document repository and only use it as such.

SharePoint Feature Ratings

Using MS SharePoint

The version of on-premise SharePoint that we use in the organization (2010) is dated by some of the web application standards that are available today. While officially the standard for our organization, parts of the organization are adopting Google and have found that it is superior to SharePoint, and mostly this has to do with the updated user interface making usability for less technical users more approachable.
ProsCons
None
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Lots to learn
  • Document repository.
  • Simple wiki (no images).
  • Simple forms.
  • Permissions and making sure access is correctly granted.
  • Advanced forms and graphing.
  • Wiki involving images which needed to be uploaded and linked to -- you cannot just copy and paste/drag & drop onto the page.