New survey reveals dissatisfaction with SharePoint

A new survey conducted by Global360, which bills itself as a "leading provider of document management and business solutions," found that more than 90 percent of respondents were using SharePoint at their company. Now, before we start crowning Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) the "King of Content Management," let's take a closer look at the respondents.

The survey was sponsored by a company that specializes in SharePoint consulting. It put out a call to its customers and promoted the survey on a site called endusersharepoint.com. In other words, the survey respondents were very likely to be using the product.

That said, there were some other interesting results, even coming from an obviously pro-SharePoint crowd. For instance a whopping 78 percent of respondents reported that SharePoint "user experience was inadequate," while only 17.6 percent chose that SharePoint was "great and adequately met their needs."

Another interesting data point seemed to defy conventional wisdom regarding SharePoint use in the enterprise. The thinking goes that there is widespread deployment, but it involves many small departmental sites without much central management, but this survey found that among these respondents, 67.05 percent reported an "enterprise-wide deployment of SharePoint."

The biggest challenges facing respondents were time and effort to build business applications for SharePoint with 30 percent choosing this option, while 20.98 percent complained about the end-user interface--a result I find curious.

It's hard to draw firm conclusions from a survey like this one, but it clearly shows some underlying dissatisfaction with the product even among the most faithful users. It probably bodes well for consultants and partners, but it also shows Microsoft still has a bit of work ahead, to make the SharePoint product easier to use for its enterprise audience.  

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