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the Free CMSWire NewsletterAt the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim California, Rob Koplowitz, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared the results of the Forrester survey on "Best Practices in SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Migration." The crowd was near capacity, and full of questions about the various data points, and some of Forrester's qualitative input. The following is a synopsis of the session, with some of my own feedback on the numbers from their survey of just under 1,000 SharePoint 2010 customers, the Forrester interpretation of the data, and my thoughts on where there may be room for additional research and investigation.
Rapid Adoption
Recognizing the complexity of the product, Rob began his presentation by saying that deployment can be very chaotic, stating "success with Sharepoint2010 can be like defining the line between control and chaos. Ultimately, it’s about functional need and organizational readiness."
What the data clearly showed was that SharePoint 2010 is gaining rapid adoption. Customers are not just looking at out-of-the-box features, but are seeking to expand through application development in the new environment. Rob mentioned the well-documented concerns people had about building out complex solutions in the MOSS2007 platform, with the result of many companies accelerating their move to 2010 to meet the need of future plans, with many companies, in particular, looking to build out stronger social capabilities.
As with most analyst reports, several questions arose from the audience (I was guilty of that) as to the level of granularity of the data. Specifically, I asked whether the Forrester data applied to customers with production 2010 environments rather than test or development environments. My thinking that many organizations may be providing answers to the survey based on their experience with non-production systems which could skew the data. Rob confirmed that customers were asked to answer based on "any systems that apply" and did not specify production systems.
Large Orgs vs Small Orgs
Another great question from the audience was whether the value proposition, in his view, changed for large versus small companies. He answered yes, elements that are compelling to small and large companies may overlap, but large companies have more need around search and management of unstructured data, which is why social is so popular. Enterprise Records Management (ERM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) are generally big company problems, while small companies are looking for basic document sharing and simple workflow and productivity solutions that are fast and flexible.
SharePoint Deployment Issues
This was a perfect segue into the underlying issue behind almost all of the negative statistics around SharePoint deployments: the importance of defining the role of SharePoint in your organization before deploying, understanding which features apply, and staying aware of end-use satisfaction issues. Rob pointed out that there are problems both with under-provisioning SharePoint (not building out enough of what people want) and over-provisioning the platform/portal (solutions that people have not asked for, cannot find a way to fit into the way they work). In both cases, he identified the issue as deployment teams not listening to their end-users, and not paying attention to the needs of the business.
You must organize your plans to capitalize on the benefits of SharePoint. Those organizations that plan are able to get the most value.
- 59% said they were able to deploy SharePoint at the pace they had expected. This doesn't indicate whether it was fast or slow, deployments, and the pessimist in me says they could have had very low expectations (such is the reality of surveys and statistics — you don't often get the detail you want, with insight into the specific survey wording or methodology).
- 57% of customers are augmenting their platform with third-party tools, which is a broad range of solutions — from web parts to workflow to administration tools. He broke this data out further, however, asking respondents whether they had expected, as part of their planning, to use third-party tools as part of their strategy. It was an almost evenly divided response.
- The most often utilized third-party tool used to augment was Nintex Workflow (8% or surveyed), with workflow being the most common solution, followed by administration, and then social tools.
- SharePoint is increasingly becoming the system-of-record, not just a document repository. This is a huge shift from perceptions (reality?) of the 2007 platform, with other tools and platforms now being positioned not as replacements, but as providing a collaborative front-end to SharePoint, most commonly in extranet or web-based. You can see this in the strategy of competitors like Box.net and Jive, where they are not fighting the SharePoint wave, but increasing their integrations with the platform.
The most audience discussion stemmed from one graph in which the following data was shared:
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