Yesterday I was the guest speaker on the AIIM webinar entitled SharePoint: Truth and Fiction. The level of interest in SharePoint continues to astound. Over 2000 people registered and well over 50% of them attended ( new record for AIIM). There were so many questions posted (I believe John Mancini, who moderated, said over 100 questions were submitted) that we clearly did not have enough time to answer them all.
So, as I always do as a follow up to a webinar, I will be posting all unanswered questions and my answers, to this blog over the next few weeks. But in the meantime I wanted to start the sharing process with a few insights.
First, for those that missed the webinar, my slides have been posted to Slideshare, and are available here:
AIIM will be making the archive of the webinar available on their site for download.
The bulk of the presentation I made is based on a survey conducted for AIIM, and sponsored by Oracle. I am in the final stages of publishing what will be a 20+ page report, providing greater detail than that in the presentation slides. The report includes commentary on the responses to over 20 questions by over 600 companies. AIIM, Oracle and Information Architected will be posting links to the report on their respective websites, in the next week or so. - Stay tuned.
OK - with that "housekeeping" out of the way, let me share one key finding here. Among the many things measured, was user satisfaction with individual SharePoint functionality, such as file sharing, search, portal platform, BPM, social computing, forms processing and records management (12 in all). Only those SharePoint users who indicated they used the particular functionality to some regular degree were asked to rank their level of satisfaction with the performance of that functionality, thus restricting responses to those from individuals actually familiar - having experience with the functionality. None of the SharePoint functionality received a strongly favorable ranking.
Overall levels of satisfaction were tightly aligned to usage habits. In other words, those functions most used received the highest grades. Make sense. Satisfaction leads to wider and ongoing usage. But even in the case of file sharing, which was cited as the most used function, only 10% ranked the functionality as "excellent", while another 33% ranked it as "very good." Conversely, 29% ranked the records management functionality as "poor", while another 31% ranked it as "fair".
What was most interesting was that most functions were predominately ranked as "good". No stellar performance from SharePoint - but clearly 'GOOD ENOUGH" - for indeed, while these satisfaction grades may not be something for Microsoft to crow about, they clearly can crow about the fact that 67% of those surveyed indicated they use SharePoint in a production capacity, and another 14% plan on doing so. So again, it may not be "spectacular" but SharePoint clearly seems to be "good enough" for many organizations.
Good enough in fact, that it is actually good for the economy as well. Despite the fact that Microsoft is experiencing layoffs, like much of the corporate world, it is driving a very healthy implementation and customization business, along with its strong SharePoint business. I shared with the audience yesterday, that as part of my ongoing research into the ECM market I run several jog searching agents. I watch the availability of job openings related to ECM to get a sense of the health of the market. As you can guess, over the last few months the lists I get are pretty short - with one exception. You guessed it - On nearly a daily basis I receive approximately a dozen listing for SharePoint consultants, developers and experts (and that's in the state of Massachusetts alone.)
Indeed, many of my colleagues in the systems integration business tell me that SharePoint-related work is continuing to keep them busy and profitable.
Good news for the economy and for those with the requisite skill set. And more good news (can't we all use some?), according to the survey many installations of SharePoint require customization and integration work, which is a major hurdle to adoption (read - there is a real need there, thus everyindication thatthe helath of the SharePoint services business should continue.)
I would love to hear from any of you with similar insights or experiences. Is SharePoint in use? How pleased are you with it? To what degree were customization and integration a factor in your deployment? Was it easy? From where did you get the required skill set?
Finally - remember, the recorded webinar will be available from AIIM; the report will be available from AIIM, Oracle and Information Architected; and starting next week I will be posting questions from the webinar along with my answers to this blog. Stay tuned...
