Lessons Learned from Enterprise SharePoint Adoption Trends

We would like to bring to your attention this SharePoint PRO
Blog by Dan Holme, AvePoint,
USA.  Dan was 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.


Read more :

 

Share this on...

Rate this Post:

Share: