Latest Market Study Shows SharePoint Requires More Effort and Dollars Than Expected

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 23, 2009 -- “SharePoint still has a way to go to product maturity.” observed Carl Frappaolo, Information Architected co-founder and principal, and author of the study. “While SharePoint has come a long way and now represents a valid choice as a component of ECM applications, the market is still ripe with opportunity for complementary solution providers and system integrators.”

The need for integration is paramount because of the immaturity of most of the SharePoint functionality. According to the survey, none of the SharePoint functions are used as an enterprise standard to any significant degree. File-sharing, is the only functionality that has gained any real traction within organizations.
Among survey respondents, 47% use file-sharing significantly and another 13% use it as an enterprise standard. The next most popularly used functions are search and collaboration, but in each case only 38% of the responding organizations use it in a significant manner.

To download the full study, with over 25 charts and 20 pages of commentary, go to http://www.informationarchitected.com/

“The reality of SharePoint”, said Carl Frappaolo,“ is many organizations have deployed SharePoint across multiple departments, but most only use it as an internal portal for basic file sharing. Very few use SharePoint for workflow or business process management, records management or social computing. The current killer applications for SharePoint are employee facing collaboration and light-weight knowledge management. More advanced uses are the rare exceptions.”

Other Key Findings:

• Roughly 70% use SharePoint at the Workgroup and Departmental level; 38% Across Departments or Enterprise-wide
• Support of more complex applications cited by 59% as a major scaling issue.

No single SharePoint function received a strongly favorable ranking among users. File sharing, search and collaboration received the highest rankings, but even in these cases, the greatest response was “very good,” not “excellent.” All other functionality, with one exception, was mostly ranked between “fair” and good”.

About the Survey

This Information Architected survey was conducted during November 2008, and was administered through an online survey instrument. A total of 616 end users participated in the survey.


There was nearly a perfect split between IT staff (53%) and business users (47%).

About Information Architected (www.informationarchitected.com )

Information Architected is a consultancy focused on the intelligent use of content, knowledge and processes to drive innovation and thrive in a digital world. It provides objective user and business needs assessments, strategy and solution design and training organizations focused on content, process, knowledge and innovation management for the global 5000.

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