Item: Microsoft SharePoint
Rating: 8
Author: Jane Updegraff

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SharePoint is used across the entire organization. It provides centrally-located, always available and easily-accessible document libraries, collaboration spaces, private, internal websites for all of our corporate divisions and their departments and a way to quickly share documents with other users.

Pros and Cons

Document sharing - it works really well for this. documents can be included in libraries and organized in folders. Documents can be uploaded as files or links to files stored anywhere that is accessible by URL.
Team discussion boards - It does discussion format very well and presents discussion sin a familiar format that all users will recognize. it can also do Wikis.

Managing access permissions is still clunky - not a whole lot better in newer versions than it was way back when it was first launched.
Re-organization of the site hierarchy isn't very easy. You need a third-party tool to do anything meaningful when you want to rearrange your site pages and move site libraries.
It doesn't provide for any kind of backup, so you have to either have it on=prem where you can backup the entire server or you have to buy a third-party tool if you are using the online hosted version (SPO).

Return on Investment

We have had no negative ROI at this point
Positive ROI includes less employee time spent looking for documents, more document storage in the cloud and less on-prem (because we use SharePoint Online - if you had on-prem SharePoint, that would not apply). User enjoy having their own space and internal communication between users has been much improved in general and not just on projects.

Alternatives Considered

I've looked at JIRA and Confluence and found that SharePoint was superior in user familiarity, since our users already knew what SharePoint did using a previous version, and also better for future-proofing since we were also interested in migrating to Office 365 eventually. We are also virtualizing some infrastructure resources to Azure so it made sense to stick with Microsoft.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Azure Active Directory, Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls

Likelihood to Recommend

It's very well suited to act as an intranet, where it's only going to be used internally by employees of a company. It works well to share documents, provide lists of reference materials to users, provide a place for departments to have their own discussions and calendars and other collaboration purposes. It includes "workflows" unlike its predecessors, and those can define the flow of a process or task and walk the user through that flow very effectively. In fact, an employee's entire job could hypothetically be scripted using SharePoint workflows. It can scale OK in small scale terms, as I have experience of using it in networks with under a few thousand users. I don't know how it would behave if there were tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of users, but provided the infrastructure is scaled proportionately, I don't see why it wouldn't work well at that scale as well.

MS SharePoint is great for sharing

Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint