We would like to bring to your attention this SharePoint PRO Blog by Dan Holme, AvePoint, USA.  Dan is a speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011 in Berlin 17th-20th October.To find out more on the European SharePoint Conference please click here

SharePoint Server 2010 is entering its third year of product life, after having been introduced to the public in beta form in October of 2009. The product's adoption has been nothing short of astounding and many lessons have been learned by enterprises large and small, across geographies and industry verticals.

Among the most important trends in SharePoint adoption that I see as an analyst and consultant are the following:

• SharePoint becomes the preferred platform for collaboration.
Microsoft positions SharePoint as the "business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web." What makes SharePoint a no-brainer for this scenario? The combination of features, usability in the browser, tight integration with Windows and Office client applications, and extensibility

• SharePoint rapidly becomes a mission-critical content repository.
Partly because users move collaboration from ad hoc email-based collaboration to SharePoint, enterprises find that SharePoint becomes a store of business-critical information.

What may have started off as a simple SharePoint Foundation or WSS team site now must be supported with SLAs that reflect the fact that now the service hosts content that is tied directly to business objectives, or that is subject to compliance regulations.

• SharePoint also becomes the single point of access to content on dispersed and distributed systems.
As users centralize their collaboration on SharePoint, there is pressure to migrate content from other sources to SharePoint-further increasing SharePoint's importance as a content repository.

There is also pressure to expose content from other content repositories-other content management systems, for example-within SharePoint, so that SharePoint serves as the single user experience.

More and more organizations are using SharePoint for collaboration even if they continue to legacy systems for long-term records management, for example.

There are even third-party tools that allow you to expose documents stored in shared folders on file servers as SharePoint document libraries, enabling an organization to enhance existing documents with SharePoint metadata, search, checkout, and versioning without having to migrate that content into SharePoint.

• SharePoint becomes the platform for delivering enterprise-wide solutions.
SharePoint is a strong contender in the choice of technology to deliver enterprise-wide solutions such as content management, knowledge management, web content management, search, social networking, and project management, to name a few.

Even where SharePoint's feature set is limited organizations can turn to rich third-party solutions that extend SharePoint.

But because such solutions build on an existing platform, rather than introduce a new platform, users, developers, and IT staff can ramp-up quickly. Adoption rates improve, and costs of training and support are reduced.

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