HarePoint Analytics for SharePoint is an unusual product in that it covers the entire spectrum of companies by both industry and size. A Fortune 100 company has recently provided us with a synopsis of their experience with the product a bit more than a year after implementation. For more information about HarePoint Analytics or about this particular installation, please contact us.
Please provide some brief context about the environment and business
We use HarePoint here at a Fortune 100 within the financial sector to provide immense value to our organization through usage analytics. Our Microsoft SharePoint farm is one of the largest in scale globally and is one of the most widely visited destinations within the firm. It is the single point destination for accessing and sharing content and expertise for projects, teams, and operations. We evaluated multiple usage analytics products and considered the specific objective that providing insights into how our farm is being utilized empowers both the technology divisions as well as business end users who are actively engaged on the content. HarePoint Analytics for SharePoint was our solution of choice, and going into year two in retrospect, it was definitely the right one.
What do you like best about HarePoint Analytics for SharePoint?
Pound for pound, feature for feature, HarePoint Analytics offers the best capability in the enterprise-class of analytics software for SharePoint. This is specific to the fact that the rich scalable feature set, native integration, and seamless deployment comes at an incredibly reasonable financial cost. HarePoint Analytics is powerful and gets the core 80/20 aspect of usage analytics capability suite exactly on target. I’m not paying for the frills, bells, and whistles. The end users LOVE it – the insights provided are specifically what they need downstream to also show the value of their collaboration and content. It is a transformational product for your SharePoint farm. The interface is incredibly easy to use and naturally intuitive for the amount of rich insights provided. It simply just works.
What do you dislike?
Ironically based on what we know now via the provided reports and insights coming from HarePoint Analytics engine, our users are directly more engaged in asking us to improve aspects of their SharePoint components. It’s an ultimately good problem to have, we finally have real data to show what’s being viewed, how it’s being used, who is using it. It does cause a bit of a stir because technically speaking you are transparently exposing very exactly how the farm is being used. Perhaps in a future edition consider additional and even friendlier controls on reporting.
Recommendations to others considering HarePoint
We would recommend to anyone considering using Microsoft SharePoint to evaluate a strategic analytics capability; specifically, HarePoint on the basis that not only does the technology deliver to expectation, but the customer service and support are amazing. Behind this great product are some great people. The relationship matters significantly because they’ve been so gracious in assisting us on our custom environment installs and have bent over backwards to ensure a great customer experience. Sure, the common aspects of usage analytics are commoditized and there are multiple vendors providing this capability. However, every SharePoint environment varies on different configuration and deployment nuances; in this regard, we’ve simply had a fundamentally solid experience with HarePoint both as a product and as a support team.
What business problem are you solving by using HarePoint?
At our Fortune 100, we have made a significant investment in our SharePoint farm. Most teams out there that have deployed this type of collaboration platform technology can certainly identify with the many-layered complexities ranging from infrastructure to operations to regulatory factors to the final actual user experience. The sheer amount of logistics involved means that the farm as a product and the organization itself has to provide measurable specifics on how it delivers value to our end users and overall firm. HarePoint directly makes this critical metric suite an incredibly visible core capability for our business end users, technology administrators, and executive leadership.
You can find more customer feedback and reviews of HarePoint Analytics and other SharePoint solutions.