We have just wrapped up a study on the use of Microsoft SharePoint to determine trends in the deployment of the solution and the likelihood of organizations deploying it over the next 12 months, among other issues. Today, we're sharing with you some of our findings.

* Among organizations that have deployed Microsoft Exchange, slightly more than one-half are currently using SharePoint and another 12% are planning to deploy SharePoint within the next 12 months.

* Today, less than 20% of SharePoint users employ the system for mission-critical applications, but that number will nearly double over the next 12 months.

* Related to the point above is the fact that the number of SharePoint applications in place today will quadruple over the next 12 months as the system becomes more widely deployed and engrained in the work habits of a growing proportion of users.

* Most organizations that are using SharePoint today do not use a hosted solution and most simply don’t know what their plans are for hosting SharePoint applications. There are a growing number of vendors that offered hosted SharePoint, but market adoption of these offerings still represents a very small proportion of the total number of SharePoint users.

* About one-third of organizations have corporate policies in place focused on the need to manage, regulate or purchase SharePoint solutions, while a much larger proportion of organizations make these decisions at the departmental or functional level.

Clearly, the data from this study, as well as other research, indicates that SharePoint is quite popular among Exchange-enabled organizations and its use will increase significantly over the next several years. The ability for SharePoint to enable enterprise content management, portal functionality, search, integration with Office applications and other collaboration capabilities means that SharePoint will become entrenched as the de facto collaboration platform for many organizations.