Users’ Love-Hate Relationships with Microsoft SharePoint

In a business environment where online collaboration platforms are becoming more and more popular, about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft's SharePoint for a total of 100 million worldwide users, according to the company's most recent estimates.

And while the web-based collaboration platform has attracted an impressive number of users since its 2001 launch, not all of them are 100 percent satisfied with the offering.

A recent AIIM International report, The SharePoint Puzzle - Adding the Missing Pieces found that nearly half of respondents feel that compared to out-of-the-box SharePoint, they could be 50 percent more productive with enhanced workflow, search, information reporting, and automated document creation tools.

[NOTE: For more insight from AIIM, join us for the webcast Automate Your Content-Intensive ERP and CRM Processes and Unclog Your Business with AIIM's Bob Larrivee. -Ed.]

The biggest, ongoing business issue for 46 percent of companies surveyed - 43 percent of whom are using the most recent, 2010 version of the software - was cited as a lack of expertise to maximize SharePoint's usefulness, followed by a lack of strategic plans on what to use it for.

Nearly half of respondents have reservations about repository scalability and archiving, AIIM reports, and over one-third are concerned with SharePoint's ability to meet their standards and compliance requirements. Users are also apprehensive about security issues. For example, 57 percent of users say that SharePoint doesn't meet their security or compliance requirements and 38 percent claim that SharePoint doesn't meet their information security needs.

Despite these concerns, SharePoint continues to grab market share in the online collaboration space. "SharePoint is rapidly becoming the multi-disciplined platform of choice for many organizations promising ECM, records management, ...