Boardable vs. Microsoft SharePoint

Overall this is a solid board/volunteer portal. It allows staff and volunteers to have an all-in-one place for operations, votes, and meetings. It is also built to allow volunteers to operate without the need for staff to do the work. A committee chair needs to set up a meeting - no problem they can go in, poll committee members, set a date, and with the preset zoom integration establishes the meeting using the company's Zoom account. Tired of building huge board packets of materials with tabs and chapters? No problem the system allows you to build it easily with attachments. Then you don't kill trees to print and mail with the Board able to view the agenda with all attachments in order with a few taps. Overall very solid product and cheaper than many other board portal services. They have some things that can be better, but nothing that should keep someone from adopting the technology.

Incentivized

SharePoint Document Management excels as a central repository for storing, organising, and retrieving documents. It supports version control, metadata tagging, secure access, and integration with tools like Power Automate. At our organisation, it's used for managing contracts, policies, and supplier documents. SharePoint Workflow Automation integrates with Power Automate to streamline approvals, gather feedback, and automate recurring tasks. This reduces reliance on email chains and manual trackers.

Incentivized

• Streamlined agenda building: Instead of spending time sending emails and attachments, I can easily build and share an Agenda with documents appended to specific agenda items. This keeps everyone organized and informed.
• Accountability: I can see when board members log into the platform and keep track of who has read which content for increased transparency and accountability.
• Real-time edits and updates: As things change or need to be added to an agenda, I can easily make edits and share these changes with board members. I can send them an email on the platform to remind them of new documents or information related to the board meeting.

Incentivized

• Making collaboration easier via a better connection between accounts. You can share anything from a file to events with just a couple of clicks.
• All services are connected and switching between services is a breeze[.]
• Solutions to the majority of everyday business problems.

Incentivized

• Meeting scheduling can be wonky with polling for a date
• A lot of the most valuable features are at a higher price point beyond the basic package.
• Opportunity to improve the minutes builder

Incentivized

• There are far too many good features to choose from, and advanced features are noticeably absent.
• There is room for improvement in terms of integration with non-Microsoft products, as well as developer Story.
• It is challenging to provide easier access via file explorer while also granting outside users and guests access.

If it was solely up to me it would be a no-brainer, however, it has to be a board decision.

Incentivized

We have too much invested at this point to do anything different and there are too many reasons as a company our size to keep it. We are heavily licensed out for Microsoft and have 12 years of SharePoint development baked into who we are. Extracting that as a tool at this point would be dumb and devastating. There are no like-kind competitors to it at an enterprise level that scale and integrate as well.

Incentivized

Boardable is very user-friendly, easy to manage, and building agendas and setting up meetings is functionally easy.

Incentivized

No usability issues reported. Individual teams also have allocated areas which replace legacy shared drives on local LANs. Access to Sharepoint resources is fully integrated with corporate Active Directory with additional two-factor authentication required for administrative users. Users have access to Microsoft Services Hub which allows you to create, manage, and track support requests while staying current on Microsoft technologies with access to select self-paced learning paths

Incentivized

Very responsive, but only through a ticketing system at this time.

Incentivized

Support for SharePoint is quite good. Microsoft provides good support. Microsoft offers

• Quick turnaround time for issues
• A range of support services
• Access to a network of resources
• Escalation of issues
• Ongoing development and commitment to produce enhancement

The majority of support is required for initial installation. Once complete and the system is operating we have had very few support issues.

Incentivized

The face to face training I received was on SharePoint Administration. It was rushed as there was a lot of information to cover and the application of the labs weren't that great either. I like to be able to relate what I am learning to what I am currently doing.

I like to learn at my own pace and online training allows for that. Additionally, you can skip through pieces of content that you already know or are already comfortable with. Microsoft actually offers great videos on their website for basic fundamental SharePoint Training. I have used these training videos in some of my own training sessions with end users.

Boardable provides ample videos, information, and support to enable new members to learn how to navigate the platform. However, not all members are motivated to learn a new software system. Lessons learned with onboarding new members is to do a Spotlight meeting with them that utilizes as many of the popular features our board uses so that they shorten their learning curve. As with anything new, "practice makes permanent!"

Incentivized

Planning to the last detail would be advised. SharePoint is a very large application that takes a lot of finesse to get operational

We didn't look at other products. I used Boardable for another organization first (as its President) and was thoroughly impressed with the easy-to-use interface, the low cost, and the quick onboarding process. I introduced the platform to our Board Chairman who gave the green light to move forward in 2019, which was a great move to do before the pandemic and our board meeting became virtual for nearly 2 years.

Incentivized

The reasons for selecting MS SharePoint are: SharePoint provides ease of use and web design assistance and support SharePoint helps you schedule your content for publishing. enables users to share documents with external parties and offers a better internal structure of the content and better indexing and searching capabilities.

Incentivized

• Allows for a quicker turnaround in getting docs to board members.
• Provides a one-stop location for all board proceedings and documents.
• Pricing plans for getting up and running are easily among the best available with similar tools providers.

Incentivized

• We've recently implemented Microsoft SharePoint access via iPads for our Template teams out on job sites. They can easily upload CAD / Laser files into Microsoft SharePoint for our production team to review in real time. Serious ROI when we don't have to wait for our Template team to get back to the shop!
• We have multiple physical locations. Microsoft SharePoint allows users at each location to collaborate by working on documents simultaneously. Allowing us to solve multi-site problems & strategize on multi-site initiatives much faster!
• We can also share key information with external partners. As long as they have a registered MS account (not necessarily an O365 account) we can share our information with them in a variety of ways. This allows consistent & concise communication with our partners.

Incentivized