Companies set to increase SharePoint Usage in 2011

Companies set to increase SharePoint Usage in 2011

New research of more than 800 businesses from a Microsoft SharePoint solutions specialist has revealed that 91% of companies are looking to increase their usage of Microsoft SharePoint in 2011.

A SharePoint solutions specialist conducted a study involving 837 businesses in a bid to discover more about what businesses want from SharePoint and how the technology is used across a variety of types and sizes of businesses.

According to the study, conducted by www.lightningtools.com, the majority, 75%, of companies asked used SharePoint; 91% of whom stated that they are planning to increase how much they use the software.

The respondents were asked to stipulate which improvements they would welcome to the SharePoint system, to which 74% of the businesses asked cited that they ‘would like to see’ improvements in the management/administration of SharePoint. Furthermore 65% stated that improvements need to be made in ‘user adoption’ and 29% agreed that how to ‘calculate return in investment’ on SharePoint could be improved.

Of the respondents that didn’t use SharePoint 2010 26% stated that they are ‘hoping to upgrade’ in the ‘third or fourth quarter of 2011’ whilst a further 25% are planning to use the new system by the ‘first quarter of 2011.’

As Microsoft and other Enterprise software companies are enforcing ‘Cloud Computing’, the respondents were asked if they would consider using SharePoint software ‘in the cloud’ to which a quarter, 24% of the businesses asked answered ‘yes’.

57% of the businesses asked would welcome the integration of ‘LinkedIn’ in to SharePoint and a further 55% stated that they would like to see ‘Facebook’ incorporated in to SharePoint.  ‘YouTube’ appears to be the least popular external website users would like to see included with 42% of the respondents agreeing.

Nick Swan, co-founder of Lightning Tools, had the following to say;

“It was great to see that so many people are happy with SharePoint and looking to increase how much they use it in 2011. It’s also interesting to see how many companies want to integrate with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and employees need to be aware that their activity on these external sites may one day be sucked into their corporate Intranet.”

He continued,

“We conducted this research to find out more about SharePoint users and it certainly did that. Cloud Computing is a buzz word in the IT industry right now – so it’s great to see initial interest from companies in finding out more about how they can leverage hosted services.”

ENDS

LINK http://www.lightningtools.com

For more information, please feel free to contact Shannon Haigh of 10 Yetis PR Agency on 01452 348211 or e-mail shannon@10yetis.co.uk

Editor’s Notes

Lightning Tools creates tools and web parts that enables users to quickly develop and deploy solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Starting with BDC Meta Man in the summer of 2006, Lightning Tools have helped countless companies and individuals integrate their line of business data with SharePoint and the BDC in minutes rather than a task which could take days if not weeks.