A survey conducted by Global 360, a business process management and case management company--and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) partner--found that SharePoint 2010 usage had increased from 8 percent in an August 2010 survey to 44 percent in a survey conducted in January this year.

The news is somewhat blunted however, given that the first survey was conducted just a few months after the release of SharePoint 2010. It always takes customers some time to catch up with the new release, but that adoption grew so quickly between surveys is still surprising. Many customers remain with a previous version of Microsoft products for years before upgrading.

It's always worth a close look at the survey audience. Global 360 polled 830 respondents for its January survey, compared with 860 in the August one. The respondents included SharePoint analysts, developers, end users, IT professionals and business managers across multiple industries worldwide. So the folks involved were definitely SharePoint users, which could have had some impact on the results. This audience was probably more likely to upgrade than an organization less invested in SharePoint.

Still, it's hard not to be impressed by the numbers. When asked what other version of SharePoint they were using if not 2010, 43 percent said SharePoint 2007, so that means that respondents were almost evenly split between the previous version and the latest. What's more, regardless of the version, 50 percent reported that SharePoint was deployed enterprise-wide, rather than as a departmental, team or other smaller implementation.

In spite of the big numbers, when asked about problems deploying SharePoint, respondents in both the August and January survey said "development time and effort required to build business applications ranked as the top SharePoint challenge."

Finally, when asked about their opinion of the SharePoint user experience, almost two-thirds of respondents or 62 percent felt it was "somewhat adequate, but required additional in-house design and development," which is pretty much par for the course when hearing about SharePoint deployment.

For more information on this survey:
- see the Global 360 press release
- download the full survey report

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