How is your company using SharePoint?
After you get done looking in awe at my new shirt, I’ve got a question for you: How is your company using SharePoint?
As I continue to talk with companies to see how they utilize SharePoint, I find there isn’t anything I can point to on how SharePoint is being used by other companies. This knowledge will be very useful for anyone developing stories and scenarios around actual use cases.
To start getting that information, Global 360 put out a little survey, 17 questions. We have had 377 responses so far. Here’s one of the things we’ve found:
That’s fascinating for me! Over 40% are using it as a Content Repository only. That means it’s nothing more than a glorified file server with most of the functionality of SharePoint being completely ignored.
Here’s another to ponder:
Which new capability within SharePoint 2010 do you believe will be most beneficial?
Notice the relatively small interest in new features compared to “Don’t Know”. Does this indicate that people are not interested in 2010, haven’t done the research to discover the new capabilities, or that the message isn’t getting out?
That’s where you come in. I’d like to keep this study going through the end of the month. If you’ve got three minutes, please take the survey. All of the questions are multiple choice, so you can click through very quickly. There’s no registration, no email required.
As our thank you for your time, after filling out the survey you’ll have access to a little “Thank You” download pack, including SharePoint and BPM – Finding the Sweetspot by Derek Miers, The BPM Primer by Colin Teubner and Kill the Things that Kill Productivity by Steve Russell.
At the conclusion of the survey on August 31, we’ll put together a full analysis with charts, graphs and commentary and email you a copy. My goal is to get 1000 responses so the community can have some real data to work with when talking about SharePoint and it’s uses.
So please take the survey, download the thank you pack and we look forward to developing new stories and scenarios based upon your input.
Regards,
Mark
on
Since the survey’s not collecting respondents’ e-mail addresses, how will you know whom to send the analysis to? (I’d like to receive it, by the way. Just took the survey–and am entering my address here. :) Thanks.
Whoops, good question. Let me get to the team and have an optional email address added at the end. Thanks. — Mark
Update: Optional email has been added to the end of the survey. Thanks for the catch.
Just one thing I have to say, “The survey doesn’t really ‘fit’ the military.” I making some changes on the fly and hope they work. Like where I work, I’m the ‘only’ SharePoint person. Thank goodness for EUSP and all the good people I learned from.
It is a pain for the It guys to manage, and counter intuitive to the way people work.
Not to mention that in most cases, it is being thrust upon end users like a day old tuna fish sandwich served on a garbage can lid, but being called a Porterhouse Steak . (I find that many articles and blogs view the End users as Sharepoint admins. End users are the end users, not admins, and quite frankly In my experience, most SP admins do not know much more then that end user themselves.)
I think folks use SP for a repository because they understand the repository concept, and SP does not screw it up for them very much.
Perhaps folks don’t know what capability in 2010 will be most beneficial because most of them still reeling from the “benefits” of the previous releases.
Don’t hold back now, Joe. Tell us what you REALLY think :-)
Well, I don’t agree with Joe’s point of view here. I have read lots of blogs and don’t come away with them viewing SP users as SP admins. Quite the oposite. And, I’m finding people who get wind of SP want to know more, and when they are introduced to it in a very general way, they jump on it and find all sorts of ways to make it work for them without me having to spoon feed them. Yes, there are a few people who come to it kicking and screaming, and claiming it has messed up their work. But when I ask them to show me what they are talking about so I can help them, they show me things that frustrate them that any program written under this sun of ours can’t satisfy them. I have one guy who has not tried SP 2007 because he had a bad experience with SP in 2001 and almost refuses to look at the progress since then. Is that typical? I don’t think so. Most I speak to in the various user groups know that no program is perfect, but SP is quite useable, and modifiable if needed. Not to shabby in my book.
I find it very interesting that a lot of sites that appear to be SharePoint fan boy related sites are not run using SharePoint. Even the SharePoint section of microsoft isn’t made with SharePoint. I don’t know why I was expecting it though. To me it would be on par with someone saying their favorite ice cream is vanilla whilst chomping down on a chocolate ice cream cone (perhaps they were out of vanilla).
Matthew,
Choose the technology that meets the need. When setting up EndUserSharePoint.com, all I needed was a platform for publishing my ideas… a blog. It would have been a waste of resources to standup or host an entire SharePoint infrastructure just to publish an article or two a day.
Now that the content has grown, it makes a lot more sense to move into SharePoint. Very soon, within the month, you will see this entire site migrated over to 2010, along with all the resources that have been gathered over the past two years: white papers, videos, web part solutions, images, downloads, etc.
Hope that clarifies.
Mark
Very Neat! I look forward to seeing what the new site will look like. I get excited every time I see someone be creative using SharePoint.
Can you publish or post a link to view all 17 questions? I am writing a paper on SharePoint and am wanting to cite the survery and explain the questions. I have already taken the survey so it just skips me forward to the end. Thanks!
Matthew,
I do not have an external site to post the questions to, but can get you a Word version of the survey. You can contact me at WEEKS,AT,GLOBAL360,DOT,COM.
Now you have my curiousity going. What kind of paper are you writing, and will you be sharing it here on EUSP.com? Who’s the target audience? What’s the subject?
Cheers,
Derek
Matthew,
I’m going to had this request over to Derek Weeks at Global 360 to see if he can give you a hand.
Mark
I tend to agree with Joe. I work as a Program Manager analyst for a very large US bank and support a team of program managers that use SharePoint to manage the programs and projects as part of a large initiative. SharePoint was simply thrust on them, without any training, any support from the centralized IT department, ability to customize it or manage. Just an OOB installation of a site. In the end, without any knowledge, support, help, management (aside from maintaining a corporate intranet secure server environment by the infrastructure team) SharePoint has become a proverbial four letter word, and everyone complains about it.
Simple tasks become impossible, requiring complex or unstable workarounds and non-intuitive approaches.
Half of the users still think that the Datasheet view is an excel file hosted on server!!!
And we are not talking about “business” users – these are IT managers!
Though we have many sites that incorporate many of the MOSS 2007 features, I still have to remind those early adopters (Site Owners) not to overwhelm their users with calendars, discussions, and wikis just because they are there. I ask them to think about whether these lists will replace meetings or email, or will they simply be another place that requires the end user to remain current, requiring peoples’ heads to simply turn faster. I agree with Joe; in that we are not pushing all the features to our hungry users. Site owners are advised of their existence yet we encourage a slower adaptation. We have a lot of Teams and Projects that mainly need (versioning) control over their documents. Simple document management within a document library can be an hour and a half worth of training including the brief explanation that SP is really a compilation of lists while demonstrating the UI. It takes 15 minutes to explain why we disabled the “New Folder” button and replaced it with a “Topic” column so that they can create views that “Group by Topic”. I depend greatly on the collaboration with the site owners during the customization of their sites and the training of their end users. We don’t what to have this go bad because of bad user experience. Slow and steady is our motto.