SharePoint 2013: Clouding The Issues

SharePoint 2013 is the fourth major incarnation of SharePoint in the last 10 years, and as we will see, some organizations find themselves supporting live versions of all four. Although not really its original purpose, SharePoint has had a major impact on the overall reach of document management and ECM compared to the deployment of earlier systems. Certainly, adoption across the “enterprise” has been much stronger for SharePoint then for other products and usage across multiple “content”-types is broader than for many traditional imaging or document systems. It is in the area of “management” that most of the debate has taken place – to what extent can SharePoint solve all of the content management, records management, and social collaboration needs of the enterprise as a whole. The arrival of many additional features in the 2013 version has added a further twist to that debate, particularly regarding the ongoing need for customizations and the use of third-party add-on products.

In this report, we look at the adoption rates and roll-out status for SharePoint as an ECM/DM system, the ongoing issues of user adoption, and overall project success – or otherwise. We measure the adoption of SharePoint 2013 and the difficulties that users report with their upgrades and migrations. We study the impact of the new 2013 features, particularly on third party add-on products that have previously been used to fill in gaps in security, governance, search and social capability. We look at the take up of the 365 product family, and the issues that cloud presents for SharePoint users. Finally, we measure spending plans for licenses, services and add-on products.

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