Doc Mgt Roll-up: SharePoint 2010 Penetration, Storing Docs in Google

By David Roe (@druadh20) Feb 15, 2011 Comments

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This week there has been more in the office web productivity space, with upgrades from both Google and mobile apps developer Equitrac. The depth of SharePoint 2010 penetration has been measured as well as its implications for document storage, while SpringCM added document workflow functionality in its latest release.

Google Docs and Security

Last week, we saw Microsoft announcing that it was extending its Web Apps to 150 countries, with the result that more people and more businesses would be able to get Office Web Apps. We also pointed out that Office web apps would be one of the big stories of the year.

Google clearly agrees with that but doesn’t make dramatic announcements about improvements to its cloud-based services Google Apps. Otherwise, we’d probably be looking at an announcement a week.

This week’s announcement will give its Google Docs application an added shine as it adds security that will make it harder to hack into documents stored in Google Docs.

With the optional layer of security, which is due to be released this week, users will have to enter passwords as normal, as well as a code that will be sent to the user’s mobile device.

Keeping in mind that security is one of the big issues preventing companies from moving into the cloud, it is likely that added security is going to give users more confidence about storing documents in Google.

What’s even better is that it takes 15 minutes to set up and will come as a new option to its Account Settings page that says "Using 2-step verification" under "Security."

This was originally offered to Google Apps users a couple of months ago, but it is now being extended to all Google users.

So another possible little chip in the veneer of Microsoft Office Web Apps and one that should be attractive to the millions of users already using other Google Apps such as Gmail. Lots more to come on this subject, which we’ll be following closely.

SharePoint 2010 and Doc Storage

But Google isn’t the only one that is increasing its market share through document storage abilities. Last week, process and case management vendor Global 360 (news, site) published research in this regard, showing that SharePoint 2010 deployment across the survey segment has jumped from 8% in September 2010 to 44%.

There’s a lot in the research, not the least of which is the fact that users are a lot happier to store their mission-critical information in SharePoint than they were before, particularly across the Insurance, healthcare and government verticals.

While more than one-third of respondents stored more than 50% of their mission-critical documents in SharePoint in this year’s survey, only 27% did so in the last survey, perhaps marking SharePoint’s maturity as an enterprise platform.

It also points to an increased need of businesses to manage the content as part of mission-critical business processes, improve their governance of the environment and protect the assets housed within the platform. Want to find out more about the research?