I have seen a few survey results over the past several weeks on how companies are using SharePoint.  I'll point out what I found as some of the more interesting findings from those surveys.

One of the first findings I find interesting is how many organizations are using (or are not using) SharePoint for Records Management.  A survey conducted by Michael Sampson, a collaboration strategist in New Zealand, represented the views of 239 respondents.  The results of his survey indicated less than a third of the respondents were using SharePoint today for Records Management.  A survey of over 750 SharePoint professionals by Colligo Networks, a leading provider of client software solutions for extending the collaboration and content management functionality of Microsoft SharePoint, had similar findings.  They indicated only 28% of the respondents were using SharePoint for Records Management.

Records Management is an area where many believe Microsoft stubbed it's toe in earlier releases of SharePoint.  There is still a lot of debate in various communities of whether they have fared better in meeting the requirements of Records and Information Management professionals in the 2010 version (see contrasting opinions on this topic on the AIIM Communities SharePoint site here and here).  I believe organizations are still being somewhat cautious in using SharePoint to manage business records, as indicated in the results of both of these surveys.

There were some areas where both surveys show that SharePoint is clearly viewed as a leader in providing certain services.  Each survey indicated over 80% of the respondents use SharePoint for collaboration.  Both also indicated over 70% of the respondents use SharePoint for a Corporate Intranet or Portal.  And a large percentage use SharePoint for content and/or document management.

I believe SharePoint is a clear leader in these areas because of the tight integration they provide between SharePoint and their Office products.  Seamless integration between content creation and publishing/sharing will always help in the usability of a solution from a user perspective.

Two of the sruveys specifically asked about the usability or user interface of SharePoint.  Global 360, a leader in process and document management, also released results of a survey they conducted of over 850 SharePoint professionals.  Their data indicated that over 20% of the respondents believed that SharePoint lacked an easy to use, intuitive interface for business users when asked the question what is the most challenging issue with your SharePoint implementation.  The Colligo Networks survey results indicated over 11% found SharePoint hard or very hard to use. 

The last data point I found interesting is how widespread the deployment and usage of SharePoint is in organizations.  In many ECM implementations, a departmental only view is taken as either a quick win or a pilot project.  This is a primary reason that many ECM implementations fail to achieve enterprise status - it never seems to get traction to the next department.  It is also a reason why some organizations find themselves with several departmental implementations of ECM technologies.  But SharePoint, either because it's brought in mainly as a collaboration platform or has reached a certain maturity level in it's third release, is seeing enterprise-wide adoption.  Both the Global 360 and Colligio Networks surveys show that over 60 percent of the respondents indicate deployment throughout the enterprise.

Many of our clients are continuting to explore usage of SharePoint in their own organizaiton.  Many have moved forward with implementing the 2010 release while others are integrating it with existing ECM technologies.  No matter where you are in the process, we would love to help you understand more about how to deploy SharePoint in your own organization.