Primary Use of SharePoint

As SharePoint is becoming more common in the enterprise world and SharePoint 2010 is rolling out extensively, we decided it was time to find out how people are using it. There a little over 300 respondents to the survey, ranging from those who aren’t actually using SharePoint yet to those who are using it throughout their company.

The Web Poll question asked was “What is your primary use of SharePoint?”. It is important to note that there may be responders to the poll using it in multiple ways, but only the primary use was selected. So, what do these poll results tell us?

The majority of respondents are still using SharePoint as an internal tool. There were 46% who say their primary use was Intranet/Extranet, 25% who primarily use it for File Sharing, and 8% who use it for Records Management. This means that 79% of respondents, 237 people, indicated primarily internal usage. In fact, 33% are using it just for file management and file sharing.

What about the web? Only 17% of the poll respondents indicated that their primary usage of SharePoint is currently for a Public-Facing websites. This means that there are a lot of SharePoint customers out there using other tools for their website content management and delivery. Will this change with SharePoint 2010 becoming more commonly used? What is the reason people are not using SharePoint for their public-facing websites?

If you have suggestions for a future poll question or comments on these results, please share them here.

To access the poll archive click here.