After the Launch, How is SharePoint 2010 Doing?

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was launched a month ago, and although the reception among customers seems favorable so far, more of them may be postponing upgrades to SharePoint than they did three years ago, according to data from Forrester Research.

Out of 243 customers who were either evaluating, implementing, or upgrading Microsoft Office in 2007, 87 percent of them planned to use SharePoint Server within a year, Forrester's data shows. Nearly a quarter of customers said they would adopt or upgrade to SharePoint immediately, and 41percent planned to do so within six months.

Three years later, however, that percentage has dropped. Forrester surveyed 90 customers who already have SharePoint and found that 28percent plan to upgrade within a year, with 21percent planning an upgrade in six months. Even though Forrester surveyed fewer customers this year, a smaller number of customers - a little over 10percent as many as in 2007 -- plan to upgrade within a year.

There was no change in the number of customers who said they won't upgrade SharePoint -- 17.

Some of the differences may be due to the different pools of customers Forrester surveyed -- three years ago not all the customers had SharePoint, and this year all of them did.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said in an e-mail interview that customer uptake of SharePoint 2010 has been "brisk … Part of this is due to organizations that were holding off until the latest version shipped. Another factor is some of the improved functionality (in SharePoint) like social capabilities and the new development environment were very compelling to organizations that viewed those as critical areas."

However, he added, "The hardest part will likely be upgrading an existing SharePoint implementation, and it's still too early to have any real information on how that will go. It was a major area of investment for Microsoft, so the hope is that migrations to the new platform will have minimal disruption."

A SharePoint consultant, Shawn Shell, said software vendors have been faster to write applications for SharePoint 2010 than they were for its predecessors. Part of that may be because Microsoft this time made fewer architectural changes in SharePoint than they've made in the past. (SharePoint 2010 is the equivalent of version three).

Mike Fitzmaurice of Nintex, which just released new workflow software for SharePoint 2010, agreed. He said Microsoft has done a good job this time of figuring out how software vendors can add to SharePoint -- two-thirds of the SharePoint 2010 platform is extensible. With Nintex Workflow, he said, customers can use SharePoint to automate a complex process, like getting a press release approved or getting a new employee hired and provisioned and then reviewed six months later.

"People have wanted to customize SharePoint since it existed, but SharePoint is made out of the Office division, and their comfort zone is shrink-wrapped product," said Fitzmaurice, who used to work on the Microsoft SharePoint team. "It's been a long education to realize that they have a platform on their hands. This is the release that they figured it out. They achieved the melding of the architecture in 2007 and took advantage of it in 2010."

The customers Shell talks to are less hesitant to adopt SharePoint now than they were three years ago, and they're also more comfortable with using SharePoint over the Web. "(In 2007) we had customers not doing things for almost a year," he said. "Microsoft treats releases like a 1.0 product, but we don't get that same story in 2010."

One customer told him SharePoint is too complicated to adopt, but he doesn't know how many more of those customers are out there.