OBS SharePoint Survey 2010
OBS’s 2010 SharePoint survey has once again provided some valuable insight into both how organisations are currently using Microsoft’s most popular server based product and their intentions for its use in the foreseeable future.
SharePoint continues to resonate with the mid market size organisations, with 90% of all respondents having already deployed SharePoint in some form and 34% of respondents having an employee base of between 1001-5000 users.
Given Microsoft’s recent release of SharePoint 2010, its 4th generation of the SharePoint product, we’re seeing a maturity in the market usage, with over 60% of organisations considering themselves “seasoned users”. The market also seems to be growing steadily with 32% only recently deploying SharePoint.
Uptake of SharePoint 2010 appears to be quite strong already (since its May 2010 release) with 4.4% having already deployed Microsoft’s latest version and 72% planning to; 78% of these expecting to do this in the next 12 months.
In-house managed deployments of SharePoint now only marginally exceed those seeking outside assistance, 48% to 47% respectively. Interestingly our 2009 survey reported 68% of organisations attempting the rollout on their own; perhaps reflecting the complexity of managing such projects while balancing day to day business operations. Once deployed however, the preference is overwhelmingly towards in-house support, with only 10% seeking external assistance on an ongoing basis.
The primary use of SharePoint continues to be for internal use with organisational intranets (82%) followed by collaboration (66%), document management (57%), forms & workflow (53%) and search (42%) being the leading purposes for its deployment. Only 14% have used SharePoint for their public facing internet site. We can expect this to change moving forward though with 63% rating an “Internet site” as their highest priority use for their SharePoint investment in the next 3 years.
Happily most organisations seem to be fairly pleased with their investments with 88% reportedly being either “somewhat satisfied” or “very satisfied”. Only 6% were “dissatisfied”.
And finally the forecasted arrival of those silver lined clouds is fast approaching with 34% of organisations considering using the approach to host part of their infrastructure. Of these, 40% either already have or will do so within 12 months; purposing it for online collaboration (58%), Software as a Service (56%), Email (45%) or Internet sites (30%).
