Michael Sampson, a Collaboration Strategist in New Zealand, has a short survey on his website asking people what they are using SharePoint for in their organizations.  He posted some in-progress results after a handful of people have responded to the survey.

It's probably not a surprise to anyone that supporting team collaboration would come in as the top use with over 80% indicating that is what they are using SharePoint for.  I expected publishing intranet content and providing document management services also to rank very high in the survey.

But SharePoint continues to rank low in being used to manage business records.  It is surprising to see that just a little over 20% of the respondents indicate they use SharePoint for this purpose and only 20-25% intend to use it for this purpose in the next 12 months.  The survey indicates that around 45% either haven't decided to use SharePoint for this purpose or will never use it for this purpose.  I'm not sure if this is because organizations are waiting to see more widespread adoption of the Records Management capabilities for SharePoint 2010 or because it is being used as a collaboration system, they don't see business records being created in SharePoint.

These responses on the use of SharePoint for managing business records are in line with some published earlier this month in the latest AIIM Industry Watch report - "SharePoint Strategies and Experiences" (available at this link, but registration required).  In the section on Functions in use, Figure 8 shows the results for the question "How would you describe your use of SharePoint in the following ECM areas?"  A little over 20% indicated they had Records Management live or were currently rolling it out.  A little over 20% said they have other solutions in place for managing records and about 30% said they have no plans to use SharePoint for Records Management.  The remaining 25% indicate they planned to use SharePoint for Records Management in the next 12-18 months.

Managing business records is an area that Microsoft supposedly invested a lot of resources in for SharePoint 2010.  It will be interesting to see as more people respond to the survey if the managing business records results change substantially.

If you haven't taken Michael's survey, it is still available at this link.