Guest Author: Derek E. Weeks
Global 360 Inc.

886 people recently took our survey to answer how businesses are using SharePoint today. When the survey report was released earlier this week, it received lots of interest across the SharePoint community. People were quick to pull out statistics from the survey and apply their own spin to them. For example:

• When we told people that 8% of companies had already deployed SharePoint 2010, some were quick to sound the alarm that SharePoint 2010 had low adoption rates (even though 2010 was released just four months ago).

• When people learned that 78% of survey participants agreed that SharePoint’s out-of-the-box user experience is not completely adequate and could use improvements, some claimed that SharePoint should be considered a development platform.

• When 54% of survey respondents stated they are currently using or planning to use SharePoint for enterprise content management, a number of people claimed the number was too low compared to their own personal experiences.

I would like to offer a different perspective on the report. It’s not the stats that count. It’s what you do next. Let me explain…

With all surveys, we feel the real value is offered when people can view the results offered by hundreds of other people and compare them with their own experiences and organizations. SharePoint surveys like those published recently by Global 360, AIIM, and Colligo provide the SharePoint community benchmarks to compare their own progress, challenges, and use of the platform.

Mark Miller, of EndUserSharePoint.com, and I recently presented a paper on the survey at SharePoint Saturday in Boston. The results led to a great interactive discussion with our audience and gave people a chance to think about and compare their own SharePoint experiences. We invited the audience to take the survey, compare their own answers to those provided by the survey respondents, and consider what the answers meant to them personally. Would the answers evoke a new action, change a behavior, or lead to a new perspective?

Let me offer a challenge to you

If you see a statistic that shows 21% of people find the most challenging issue with SharePoint implementations to be the lack of intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces for business users – consider first how your own interfaces compare. Do your interfaces look like the standard blue SharePoint interfaces out-of-the-box or do they look like some of the best in class examples shown at WSS Demo? Ask yourself if it is about time to consider improving the SharePoint interfaces for your business users.

If you read the AIIM SharePoint survey which points out that 60% of businesses are planning to use SharePoint for workflow and BPM in the next 18 months, don’t argue with the statistic. Ask your organization if they are taking advantage of SharePoint as well as others are? What third-party applications should we be considering that other organizations find useful? How are other organizations driving value through their SharePoint investments to ensure that it will be around for the next 10+ years?

Clearly, the SharePoint surveys all revealed that the platform has shed its historical image of just being a content repository and portal. Today, we invite you to share your own experiences with others, trade best practices, and discover new ways to bring value to your SharePoint implementations – please comment below. Then in early 2011, we will run a new survey to provide a new update on today’s results. Let us know what questions you might want to see in the survey, and we’ll be sure to include the most popular ones from your comments below.

Guest Author: Derek E. Weeks
Global 360 Inc.

Derek Weeks joined Global 360 in 2009 bringing more than 18 years of product management and marketing experience in the enterprise software market. Prior to joining Global 360, Derek was the Vice President of Product Marketing at Systar, Inc., responsible for marketing the company’s Business Activity Monitoring for BPM product line. Over his career, Derek held executive and senior management positions at Hyperformix (acquired by Computer Associates), StorageTek (acquired by Sun Microsystems), and Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView software business where he led product management and product marketing disciplines for portfolios ranging from $12M to over $1.5B.