Forrester Reports on the Strength of SharePoint 2010
One of the more interesting sessions at the SharePoint Conference held at the Anaheim Convention Center in California last week was "Best Practices in SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Migration" led by Principal Analyst and Vice President at Forrester Research, Rob Koplowitz. 
The presentation was based on surveys and analysis of just under 1,000 SharePoint customers who had deployed SharePoint 2010, with a mixture of production and test environments. While Mr. Koplowitz shared a number of interesting statistics and qualitative analysis, several points stood out:
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The rate of adoption of SharePoint 2010 is much higher than those who moved from SPS2003 to MOSS2007, with 57% of respondents reporting that they had moved to SP2010, although there was no qualifying data outlining production over test environments. At the point of the survey, only 4% of respondents had moved to Office 365, but this was prior to the major push of the cloud platform. Because this was the first survey of its kind, there is no historical data. Issues affecting rate of deployment were technical (which were interpreted as problems outside of the platform) (59%), lack of governance policies and procedures (planning) (41%), and functional issues with the product itself (36%).
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SharePoint has become the system of record, with competitors shifting their marketing to highlight integration rather than replacement, using SharePoint as back-end to their differentiating front-end solutions. A large majority (79%) of respondents said that SharePoint is meeting IT's expectations, with 73% stating SharePoint is meeting business management's expectations.
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The largest opportunities for growth/expansion within existing deployments are around BI/Analytics (41% had no plans to deploy this capability, with 33% having plans but not yet deployed), and extranets (47% had no plans, with 23% having plans but not yet deployed). These data points may indicate forthcoming third-party and service opportunities.
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Much of the focus tied back to the importance of planning. Many of the data points outlining points of failure or negative impressions on features could be traced back to a lack of planning/coordination with the business.
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Most companies are augmenting SharePoint with third-party tools (57%), with the majority rolling out third-party tools as part of their strategy, or augmenting their strategy based on lack of SharePoint native capabilities (44% and 38%) to meet those needs. Either way, the report was very supportive of the Microsoft partner ecosystem, with the top third-party solutions consisting of workflow (12% of respondents using them), administration (10%), web parts (9%), and social (6%). Axceler tied for 3rd most used third-party solutions
You can read more of my analysis on the Forrester report on my article for CMSWire (here), or review the Forrester report itself (here).
Clearly, SharePoint 2010 is the strongest offering to date for the platform, and licensing and adoption numbers show that it has become a major aspect of most organization's intranet, extranet, and internet activities. Not surprisingly, Axceler has become an increasingly important part of the SharePoint ecosystem, providing administration, governance, and migration solutions to help fill the platform gaps.
For more information on our award-winning products ControlPoint, Davinci Migrator, and FileLoader, and how they can augment your SharePoint environment to help you get the most out of your investment, please contact us.