SharePoint has once again landed Microsoft in the leaders section of Gartner’s “magic quadrant” for enterprise content management, an achievement described in an article from CMSWire. The quadrant breaks up products into four categories: leaders, challengers, visionaries and niche players. The leaders section – obviously the place to be – is reserved for companies with the best completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Microsoft has been a perennial member of the leaders section starting with SharePoint 2007, and has built on its strengths with SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, as well as with the SharePoint component of Office 365. The report cited the deep and broad SharePoint ecosystem, promising trends in SharePoint 2013 migration and the Swiss-Army knife range of SharePoint’s applications as strengths. Areas of caution included sometimes disappointing rates of user adoption, uncertainty about Yammer integration and unfamiliarity with the SharePoint 2013 model of development.

In addition, some users have complained about the limited native mobile capabilities of SharePoint. Fortunately, one benefit of SharePoint’s strong market penetration relates to mobile support and workflows. SharePoint has many third-party build-ons that can address these areas, whereas other less-established collaboration platforms can’t offer the same support. Microsoft has a large community around SharePoint, and as a result, most issues and perceived weaknesses do get addressed.

Among the biggest upgrades to SharePoint 2013 is the new FAST Search Server capabilities. This represents a significant upgrade, and, even better, it’s available out of the box with little or no configuration required. Better search capabilities will certainly boost confidence in the system and improve user adoption.