Microsoft SharePoint: Three deployment challenges

September 28, 2010 04:02 PM ETCIO - Enterprise adoption of SharePoint is rapidly on the rise: A new survey from document management company Global 360 reveals that 90% of the survey's 886 respondents use SharePoint, with 8% using SharePoint 2010.

Moreover, 67% of those that use SharePoint spread it out enterprisewide, indicating that SharePoint is not just for the IT department, it's for all departments.

The survey also highlights how SharePoint is used at organizations. It commonly starts out as a content repository but then transitions to something more dynamic. Sixty-seven percent of survey respondents have extended SharePoint's use to manage document workflows; 66% use it for portal and web content management; and 56% use it to support business processes.

The idea of using content in SharePoint to improve the business is a major theme of the survey. Of the organizations surveyed, 27% say that over half of the documents stored in SharePoint are used to support mission-critical parts of the business.

But despite widespread adoption as well as improvements in search, workflow and social networking in SharePoint 2010, the SharePoint platform does come with its own set of challenges, according to the survey results.

SharePoint, particularly SharePoint 2010, has made advances in areas such as social media, offline access and better CRM and ERP integration. But according to the Global 360 report, "the gap between what has been delivered and what can be achieved is still dramatic."

Of the 60% of respondents who noted the SharePoint user experience as inadequate, 47% are building custom applications within their SharePoint environments. And this takes time. Thirty percent of survey respondents cited "development time and effort required to build business applications" as the top challenge when implementing SharePoint.

The report concludes that many organizations hoping to reduce the time, resources and expertise needed to integrate custom apps into SharePoint are considering third-party applications to add business process management, business intelligence and content management features to SharePoint.

This story is reprinted from CIO.com, an online resource for information executives. Story Copyright CXO Media Inc., 2010. All rights reserved.