Surveys in the tech industry often have to be taken with a grain of salt, but I was intrigued this week when I saw the headline “New survey reveals dissatisfaction with SharePoint.”
This isn’t necessarily a surprise. As widely used as Microsoft’s SharePoint is, it requires customization and sometimes third-party tools to unleash its full potential.
Review: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
The article I saw, on Fiercecontentmanagement.com however, claimed that “a whopping 78 percent reported that SharePoint ‘user experience was inadequate.'”
These types of numbers make for juicy headlines, so tracked down the original report from Global 360, a vendor in process and document management. After looking through the findings in the report titled “How are businesses using Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise?”, I realized it could just as easily have said that 78% of SharePoint users love the product.
One handy pie chart (Figure 9 in the report) says that 60% of survey respondents reported that “SharePoint user experience is somewhat adequate but requires additional in-house design and development.”
To me, that sounds like 60% of respondents are saying SharePoint user experience is satisfactory, but that some additional work is needed to make the product more useful. That’s no surprise.
But on the very next page, the report calls this same group “the 60% of respondents who noted the SharePoint user experience as inadequate.” At other points, the report revises this figure upwards by including 8% who say SharePoint is inadequate and therefore requires third-party products to improve the application interface, and another 10% who say SharePoint is inadequate but that they don’t have time or money to invest in fixing it.
Add it all together, and the report states that “78% found the SharePoint user experience inadequate.”
But lo and behold, the survey also found that 18% of users say “SharePoint has a great user experience out-of the-box and is adequate for our needs.” Add that 18% to the 60% who call SharePoint “somewhat adequate,” and a headline could easily say “78% are satisfied with SharePoint,” instead of “78% find SharePoint inadequate.”
How did “somewhat adequate” turn into “inadequate”? I suppose if something is not completely adequate, that would make it inadequate, but the report seems to be contradicting its own language throughout.
The most accurate sentence in the report in reference to this finding is probably the one that says “the strong majority of organizations (77.9%) described SharePoint as somewhat adequate to inadequate.” That’s a fair characterization of the results, although it doesn’t really say anything interesting.
All of this is only to point out how easy it is to draw nearly any conclusion you want from survey data. As a journalist, I’m well aware of this and have probably been guilty of the same crime myself.
But I don’t want to completely dismiss the Global 360 survey, because it does offer some worthwhile points about SharePoint, especially the challenges businesses face in drawing value from the software. Even users that are happy with SharePoint say it takes some work and customization to make it more useful – that’s not under dispute
My colleague Shane O’Neill over at CIO.com details three of these challenges, namely that out-of-the-box user experience is not great, building business applications takes time and effort, and difficulty getting IT and business users on the same page.
The Global 360 survey was conducted in August 2010 and included 886 people who work in multiple industries and are familiar with SharePoint.
The software has not only been adopted by most businesses, but a quarter of SharePoint users say over half of documents stored and managed with SharePoint “are supporting mission-critical business processes,” Global 360 reports.
Accessing data through SharePoint is not always straightforward.
“The gap between today’s ‘access to some information’ and the user’s desire of ‘access to all information’ is hampering productivity with SharePoint’s increasing role as the place to do business,” the Global360 report says. “72% of organizations said external data is not available to them through SharePoint. When data is available, they have to access it through a separate native legacy/application interface. Organizations will experience productivity losses when end-users have to switch between applications to do their work.”
While most SharePoint users are still running the 2007 version, SharePoint 2010 is starting to catch on and users are reporting improvements.
“Survey participants also touted new SharePoint 2010 features such as improved workflow management, application development environments, and content search,” Global360 said. “Furthermore, adoption of SharePoint 2010 looks strong with over 8% of organizations revealing that they have deployed this newly released version.”
Although 92% of SharePoint users haven’t yet adopted 2010, I’m guessing at least 99% of them are aware that the product exists and expect it to be three years older than the 2007 version.
Instead of ending this blog post with something useful, or adequate to the task, I’ll just leave you with one of my favorite lines from the Lord of the Rings, spoken by 111-year-old Bilbo Baggins: “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
Make sense?
