Last week I closed the What are you doing with SharePoint? survey. My thanks to the 239 people who filled out the 3 minute, 3 question survey. It was much appreciated.
Here is the overall picture … across industries, based on 239 responses.
Some comments, looking at the chart above:
- Supporting team collaboration and Publishing Intranet content are the two most widely used areas of SharePoint today. SharePoint has been about collaboration since the beginning (“Team services”), so the collaboration part makes sense. And once you’re using it for collaboration, it’s easy to extend that to intranet publishing … or indeed, the other way around works too.
- Encouraging social collaboration is a new part to SharePoint, added with SharePoint 2007. There is about 25% use of this now, and this is forecasted to grow to almost 60% within 12 months. It’s a big growth area. The same broad comments apply to business intelligence / insights too.
- The use of SharePoint for Publishing Internet Web Sites is the second least used area today, and is forecasted to be the least used within 12 months. It’s also the biggest area where respondents claimed they would “never” do it with SharePoint.
- Overall, the top 4 application areas are: (1) supporting team collaboration, (2) publishing intranet content, (3) providing document management services, and (4) enabling workflow processes.
- Overall, the least used application areas are: (1) providing business intelligence and insight, (2) publishing Internet web sites, (3) managing business records, and (4) encouraging social collaboration.
Next up … a breakdown of these results by various industries.
Categories: Microsoft SharePoint, Tools & Technologies
Michael Sampson 
Thank you for that excellent analysis. This is fantastic information on how SharePoint is being used in the enterprise.
Stacy
Great insight Michael!
My stab at this, is that still the social intranet, is under the radar and the user adoption is still in its early trials. As also mentioned from many e.2.0 folks.
The 2003, and 2007 sharepoint platforms still sits stable in the foundation from where it all begun, and only few new comers have actually done any real work in 2010 where the ‘social’ fabric actually works.
What strikes me most is that still ‘findability’ or in your set of survey questions “empovering enterprise search” still have so low impact. From my own research within collaboration, social business, intranet and the like. The most common response I get is the urge to improve findability, when sharepoint user adoption raises and we get millions of ‘silos’. I think many corporations still do not see Sharepoint as the ‘search’ thingy.
Jack of all trades but master of none, as in Sharepoint trying to grasp most of it…. also reflect that many organisations do not embrace a more pragmatic governance model to cover the IM or ECM holistic view. Good work still!
Many thanks for sharing this Michael. Do you have a feel for how well mixed the functions of the respondents were? In working with clients to develop their SharePoint strategies there seems to be a pattern of IT leading the way for SharePoint as a collaboration tool and Comms driving it for communications and social media.
Thanks Fredric … good to hear your thoughts on this. And yes, it’s very early for SharePoint 2010 – fully agree with you there.
M.
Sam, I agree with your broad characterization, but the survey did not ask for a functional role when gathering the data. So … I can’t give you numbers either way.
M.
This is very good! Have sent to some clients plus some people I know at Microsoft 🙂