While we have seen over the week just gone by the massive interest in SharePoint and a steady increase in the deployment of SharePoint 2010, how it is being used across the enterprise varies. A new EMC-sponsored AIIM report shows that one of those uses is as an enterprise content management system.
SharePoint Deployments

The report — entitled Using SharePoint for ECM: How well is it meeting expectations? by Doug Miles and based on the results of 674 surveys carried out across AIIM members between April 15 and May 5 — confirms that, already, SharePoint 2010 is being used by a large number of enterprises for content management.

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Recently published, it shows, in fact, that over a third of organizations are using SharePoint to manage content across the enterprise, and over half believe that SharePoint will become their primary enterprise CMS in the future.

While it is debatable whether this is a good or bad thing, it also shows that over 60% of users are showing strong interest in third-party additions and integrations, which can fill perceived functionality gaps.

Behind those figures, though, there are some notable caveats. While many are using it for content management, traditional enterprise CMS applications such as scanning and capture, forms processing, document workflow and records management have yet to be widely adopted.

There are other problems too. While we have noted before that planning deployments is still a major issue for many enterprises, both this research and other research released by OpenText during the SharePoint Anaheim conference shows that deployment still appears to be haphazard.
Where is SharePoint Now?

It is not really surprising that interest in SharePoint as an enterprise content management system is as high as it is, given adoption rates across all verticals and in all business segments from SMBs to Fortune 100 companies.

Over the past ten years, since the first release, it has moved from being an intranet and basic collaboration application to something that is now used for portals, collaboration, forms processing, business intelligence, business process management and content management.

According to Miles, who heads AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division, its adoption is in the region of 60-70%, and with the improved functionality in SharePoint 2010 of content management, records management and business process management capabilities of SharePoint, this is set to increase.

While there is still no agreement as to whether it provides true enterprise CMS capabilities in comparison to traditional suites, there is no doubt from this research that where it is deemed to be lacking by enterprises, third-party add-ons are being used instead.

While the popularity of SharePoint is indisputable, and despite much talk about upgrading to the 2010 version since it was released in May last year, it seems enterprises have been slow to make the jump, the research shows.

According to Miles, only 8% of SharePoint users have completed the upgrade to 2010, while the rest are either happy to stay with the 2007 version, or just haven’t got around to moving yet.

That said, 21% have deployed SharePoint 2010 as a first use with 6% of those live already and a further 28% moving from 2007 to 2010, with half of those expecting to be fully live by the end of the year.