SharePoint 2010 Used Mainly for Collaboration; Enterprise Content Management to Grow, AIIM Says

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jun 27, 2011

Like many, we have been following the evolution of SharePoint 2010 since its general release last year. Anecdotal accounts suggest widespread deployment and use across enterprises with further deployments on the way. A little over a year later, we still wonder whether it has lived up to its initial promise and what exactly it is being used for at the moment and where it will go in the future.

It is difficult to answer those questions and to gauge whether companies have a clear SharePoint 2010 strategy, or whether enterprises — and it seems this is the case with at least some — have simply adopted a "Deploy now, strategize afterwards” approach.

Doug Miles, head of the AIIM Market Intelligence Division, has been thinking along the same lines, and, through AIIM, has published research that attempts to answer some of those questions.

Using SharePoint for ECM. How well is it meeting expectations? surveyed 674 members of the AIIM community in April and May this year.

He says SharePoint itself has developed since its first iteration into a solution that does just about everything for intranets, to enterprise collaboration, to business intelligence and business process management with an adoption rate of 60% to 70%, he says. Some figures that are worth noting about SharePoint in the enterprise include:

Only 8% of SharePoint users have upgraded to 2010 version so far; 21% are deploying 2010 as a first use.
36% say they have SharePoint “in use across the enterprise for content management.” Included are 11% with no other content systems; 19% running unconnected ECM/DM/RM systems
A quarter consider their stored content in SharePoint to be doubling every two years or less and 5% have over 10TB of data already.
Collaboration and intranet are the most widely used application areas, then document management and search.

SharePoint 2010: How enterprises are using it

SharePoint Adoption

Going back to the State of the ECM Industry Report earlier this year, we saw that 70% of the largest companies have completed an implementation of SharePoint.

Of all the enterprise licenses, only 36% or organizations are using it for content management, including 11% who have it as their sole ECM and 19% who have other ECM, RM or DM systems.

For content, most have less than a terabyte stored in deployments — 17% have more than 20TB — and many believe that the amount of content stored is growing at a rate of between 20% and 30% per year, with a further 28% estimating that it is doubling every year.

Enterprise Collaboration, Intranet, Portals

Looking at the applications that are being used for the most, we see that enterprise collaboration, intranet provision and portals are the most common uses, followed by document management and project management.

With functions such as imaging and forms capture, or records management, we see that only 8% of companies report using them widely. Project management is more popular in the US, with social business the principal European interest. Looking to the future, planned uses include: