One of the most interesting findings from our survey was the speed with which organizations intend to deploy SharePoint 2007. We asked two questions on the topic: When are they planning to deploy WSS 2007 and when are they planning to deploy MOSS 2007. We expected to see deployments late in 2007, but to our surprise, respondents indicated deployment sooner.
53% of respondents indicated that they would deploy WSS in early 2007, while 17% indicated late 2007. However, 26% of respondents were not sure when they would deploy. So, of those that ARE sure, 72% were deploying WSS in early 2007 and 23% in late 2007 – a total of 95% in 2007.
The overall percentage of users indicating a definite move to MOSS 2007 is lower with only 66% indicating firm plans. This could be because smaller organizations may not deploy MOSS at all. The upgrade is, understandably, a little bit slower as well due to the complexity of server deployment. Of those that ARE sure, 55% said they would deploy in early 2007 while 39% indicated late 2007.
In my next post on survey results, I will report on when the respondents plan to deploy Outlook 2007.
One of the open ended questions we asked in our survey was how respondents were using our offline SharePoint tools today. Below is a summary of some of the most common answers:
Who uses offline SharePoint tools?
Department and division managers: traveling to remote locations.
Sales people: when on the road or at a customer location.
All staff: to provide access to SharePoint when they are offline.
IT project managers: to take offline copies of IT project related sites for use when on client premises.
Engineering project managers: to be able to view content when working off site.
Consultants: to enable them to work in the field.
Analysts: to access the latest commodity information when they travel.
Frequent travelers to, and staff in, foreign countries.
Why do they need them?
Customers or partners often do not allow visitors to connect through their firewall to access SharePoint content.
Obtaining a reliable connection to SharePoint can be difficult when users are in transit, such as on a plane or train.
In foreign countries, particularly in the developing world, Internet connections are often unreliable or unavailable.
How do they Use them?
To sync to the latest versions of sales tools, such as presentations, specifications, and media content for availability while traveling or at a customer site.
To have the latest copies of reference documents, such as practice manuals when out of the office.
To edit documents or list items without connecting to the internet.
As a personal backup of SharePoint site content.
For team members working offsite to have access to the teams documents wherever they are.
Next, I’ll discuss our respondents’ plans for deployment of SharePoint 2007.
We asked our survey respondents to tell us how many employees worked in their organization. 38% had over 1000 employees, 31% between 100 and 1000 and 31% below 100. So the majority of Colligo for SharePoint users who responded to the survey are from larger organizations.
We also asked how many SharePoint users their organization had. 62% of our survey respondents at organizations with over 1000 employees reported over 1000 SharePoint users. This indicates that SharePoint has become a mainstream collaboration platform used by many employees, not just isolated pockets – at least among our customer base.
Next, we’ll look at how our survey respondents are using offline SharePoint products.
Response has been strong since we launched Colligo Reader and Colligo Contributor in the spring of this year. Now that there is a critical mass of users of the Colligo for SharePoint products, we felt that it was time to survey our customers. We learned a lot about the nature of SharePoint deployments at their organizations, their plans for future upgrades, how they are using our products, how they like them and what features they will be looking for in the future.
Some of the results we received were surprising to us. We thought they might be interesting to others, so over the next while I’ll post some of them here.
In this post I’ll talk about how the survey was conducted. In early August, we sent out email requests to a selection of our end users. About 130 people from over 100 different companies responded. We use a tool called QuestionPro to do our surveys and by all accounts it performed pretty well. The survey consisted of 13 multi-part questions.
Many of the respondents were from the IT departments of their companies which makes sense since they are generally the primary interface point for software vendors. About 50% of respondents classified themselves as either being in IS or tech support. The other 50% were end users, with the largest being consultants (22%), followed by operations (8%), sales & marketing (7%), finance & HR (2%) and other (11%). So the offline need for SharePoint is spread across several departments.
Next up, I’ll post some interesting things we learned about SharePoint adoption within our customers organizations.
