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SharePoint: It's Everywhere, but What to Make of It
Since May, SharePoint 2010 has been out in the wild. It has been a big business for Microsoft. AIIM now estimates that SharePoint sales topped $1.3 billion in 2008 and is growing at an annual rate of 25 percent.
Different reports made by AIIM this year find that anywhere from 74 percent to 98 percent of organizations are planning to try SharePoint. But how are organizations using it? The AIIM report found that:
- 47 percent use it for file sharing
- SharePoint is used infrequently for complex business processes, records management or digital asset management
- SharePoint is typically viewed as just one component of a larger Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy
Ann All quoted Rob Helm, managing VP of research at Directions on Microsoft, as sayting that “Microsoft is going to continue to pull SharePoint through as an infrastructure. It may never be as dominant as Office, but it may be like SQL Server, Microsoft’s database product. If you’re on the Microsoft stack, you almost can’t avoid it.”
The low price point to get started and the ready availability of the software have led to many organizations starting to use SharePoint, but really without any plan for what to do with it. In fact, the AIIM report pointed out that governance is one of the biggest issues around SharePoint. AIIM found that 60 percent of organizations use SharePoint with no modifications out the box. Of the more than 50 percent of the organizations that are using SharePoint, the decision to use it was made without a formal business case. In those organizations using SharePoint, just 22 percent provide any guidance to their workers about document types and classification, and less than 15 percent have any notion about retention policies and legal discovery procedures.
For those organizations with an upfront plan for what they want to accomplish with SharePoint, AIIM found that getting SharePoint to do things the way that their organization wants often isn’t as easy as they expected. 30 percent said that development time and effort required to make SharePoint business ready was a big challenge for them. About one-thrid of the respondents said their SharePoint projects took them longer to implement than expected, and 21 percent complained that the SharePoint interface was not intuitive or easy to use.
