Survey Reveals Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Deployments Increased Five Fold In 6 Months

SOURCE: Global 360

Global 360, a leading provider of process and case management solutions, today unveiled the results of the How are Businesses using Microsoft® SharePoint® in the Enterprise? Market Survey 2011. The survey was conducted to determine the breadth and depth of Microsoft SharePoint usage in the market today, understand how companies are driving value out of their implementations, and identify challenges related to their investment.

January 2011 survey results can be compared with results from the How are Businesses using Microsoft® SharePoint® in the Enterprise? Market Survey 2010 published in September 2010.

830 SharePoint analysts, developers, end users, IT professionals and business managers across multiple industries worldwide participated in the survey. Key results include:

SharePoint 2010 Deployment Upgrades Increase Five-fold in the Past 6 Months

Deployments of SharePoint 2010 have grown from 8% of respondents in the September 2010 survey to 44% of the 2011 survey participants. With SharePoint 2007 deployments at 43% of survey respondents, SharePoint 2010 deployments have now caught up with their predecessor.

SharePoint Gains Acceptance Beyond Ad-hoc Departmental Deployments

Fifty-seven percent of respondents have deployed SharePoint “enterprise-wide” or “regionally by specific offices” pointing to its acceptance by business users.

Increased Support of Mission-Critical Business Processes

Thirty-three percent of respondents stated that over half of the documents stored in SharePoint support mission-critical processes. At the same time, 58% of survey participants revealed that their organizations plan to or have already extended its use to manage business processes. Both of these results are evidence that SharePoint 2010 is becoming more viable as an enterprise class application platform. The value of SharePoint is shifting away from its historical position of storing content toward one where content-based applications support mission-critical business processes.

Third-party BPM Technologies Integrated with SharePoint Enhance Business Value

Despite its widening acceptance as a powerful application development platform, 19% of survey respondents identified the biggest challenge with SharePoint deployments as being the “development time and effort required to build business applications”. The difficulty in development time also affects the second largest challenge of “end user adoption and training” (17%). If strong applications do not exist for end users, adoption rates will lag expectations, pointing to the growing importance of third-party developers in the Microsoft community to help deliver business applications on top of the SharePoint platform.