A recently released market study conducted by Information Architected (on behalf of AIIM and Oracle), found that half of the organizations using SharePoint experienced more effort and budget than expected in development of the SharePoint solution, and point to integration issues as among the greatest challenges to deployment.

“The bottom line is that SharePoint still has a way to go to product maturity.” said Dan Keldsen, Information Architected’s Chief Innovation Officer and Principal Consultant. “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, the genesis of SharePoint, 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 or enterprise-standard manner.

To download the full study, with over 25 charts and 20 pages of commentary, go to www.informationarchitected.com/moss09wp

“While many organizations have deployed SharePoint across multiple departments, most only use it as an internal portal for basic file sharing.” said Information Architected’s, Dan Keldsen. “Very few are using 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.
• 67% are using SharePoint and another 16% plan on doing so, most installations are tactical and not strategic in nature.

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’. The only deviation came in regard to portal platform functionality, which ranked between ‘good and ‘very good.’

About the Survey
This Information Architected survey was conducted during November 2008. A total of 616 end users participated in the survey.

There was an almost even split between medium and large companies and IT staff and business users.

To download the full study, with over 25 charts and 20 pages of commentary, go to www.informationarchitected.com/moss09wp

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.

Primary Contact:
Dan Keldsen
Chief Innovation Officer and Principal Consultant
Phone: 617-933-9655
E-mail: dk[at]InformationArchitected[dot]com