Jul9Written by:SuperUser Account
7/9/2010 8:58 AM 
By Klint Finley
A survey by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) found that although Microsoft SharePoint is being rapidly adopted by the enterprise, at least half of the enterprises polled that are implementing the platform don't have business uses in mind and many lack specific policies regarding its use. The survey was underwritten by Allyis, Autonomy, EMC, HP, IBM, Kofax, NewsGator and Open Text (many of whom offer competing products).
Adoption is fast paced: 23% of respondents say all their office staff actively use SharePoint, and another 23% expect all of their office staff to use SharePoint within a year.
However, implementations are suffering from a lack of planning and facing resistance from some staff. Half of all SharePoint deployments were approved with no business justification. Although only 1/3 of respondents found SharePoint deployments took longer than expected (pretty good for enterprise deployments), and cost overruns were reported less often, many faced issues with management of process change and user resistance to new interfaces.
Among respondents in the process of implementing SharePoint, 1/3 say they have no management plans regarding which SharePoint features to use when and where, and 26% say implementation is being driven by the the IT department with no input from information management professionals. SharePoint is 37% of respondents' first ECM system.
Only 58% of organizations with active SharePoint implementations say they have a policy on site ownership and responsibilities, just 10% say they have end of life policies for SharePoint sites and only 22% provide users with any guidance on corporate classification of content types.
Among respondents who have completed their SharePoint implementation, 58% report being able to do most of the things they needed with SharePoint. Others are using customizations and plugins for added functionality. ROI has been better or much better than expected according 28% of respondents, as expected for 40%, and only 9% consider it to be less than expected. The rest said it was too soon to say.
Collaboration is the most popular use, followed by document management, file-sharing and intranet creation.
Read more from ReadWrite Enterprise here.