I’ve been thinking a lot about SharePoint governance lately. It could be because of Dave Chennault’s article, which is coming up in the February issue of SharePointPro Connections magazine. It could be because of the new year coming, and the very human desire to clear the decks and start anew.
At any rate, his article has opened my eyes to the need for planning before you do any migration or deployment of SharePoint. In other words—and I love the irony of it—you need to collaborate BEFORE you ever get this collaboration platform up and running.
(How about someone creating a solution that helps you collaborate to plan the deployment of your collaboration solution? I’m sure it’s already on the drawing board somewhere.)
Indeed, according to a survey in mid-2010 conducted by AIIM, collaboration is the most popular application of SharePoint, with document management and file-share replacement following in close second and third place. AIIM says, “As one might expect, ‘collaboration/workspaces/team sites’ is the most popular application, and is the least in conflict with existing or alternative solutions. This confirms the view that Microsoft successfully targeted a latent demand for browser-based collaboration with the original SharePoint concept, and this has subsequently resonated with the increase in globalized teamwork and increased mobility.”
In the AIIM survey, the use of SharePoint as a portal and as an intranet is the next most popular usage, followed by those who are taking advantage of blogs, wikis, and forums with SharePoint. SharePoint 2010’s improved features in this area might be prompting organizations to plan migrating or upgrading in 2011, and from our own experience, we’ve seen most readers express interest in SharePoint 2010, though many are still not doing more than testing it at the moment. AIIM’s survey also notes that “There is, however, quite a long tail of users who will still be digesting their 2007 implementation for some time yet.”
Digesting. Yes, that’s the word I was looking for.
May your SharePoint gustatory experiences in 2011 open your world and pay your bills in a most satisfactory way.
To download the survey, visit AIIM’s website for the PDF.
