Seems like we’ve been quoting a lot of surveys in the space recently. Well, that’s because I’ve come across a lot of different looks at how SharePoint is used, what people plan to do with it, and what people identify as their biggest issues with SharePoint, and I enjoy sharing this data with you. Today’s survey was taken at Microsoft’s SharePoint 2013 conference in Las Vegas by third-party software provider Metalogix; about 125 SharePoint professionals responded.

FLASH: Forty percent of respondents are still using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007!

Accordingly, Microsoft has extended mainstream support for SPS 2003 through April 2014, and currently supports Service Pack 3. MOSS 2007 support, originally scheduled to end in October 2012, also has been extended (to October 2017). Even SharePoint Server 2010, set to reach end-of-life in 2015, has been pushed back to October 2020. So, aside from having to explain on every support call why you’re not upgrading to a newer version, there is no real urgency to upgrade—oh, except, of course, for all the new features and capabilities.

Regardless of the version you’re using, you’re also probably experiencing the same year-over-year content growth that 75% of the respondents indicated they were seeing. Aside from the need to grow your content repository, you’ll also come up against problems backing up all that content, organizing it, and searching it. In fact, respondents said that on average, their organizations are holding more than 1TB of content in every farm.

“Administrators who reorganize content for users can’t keep up. They’re getting inundated by service requests to simply reorganize content,” said Jignesh Shah of Metalogix. He said companies must re-examine the traditional strategies they use for these tasks. More self-service capabilities would enable admins to free themselves from this particular service request.

For backup, newer strategies will be needed, he said. “You’ve got to look at strategies for continuous backup, not waiting until content piles up, or look at backup on the fly, so that when content is created or changes, it’s backed up at that time.”

Make that content business-critical, and the complexity of the problem is magnified. “You can’t just move business-critical content around without considering your security and backup and recovery options,” Shah said. “This growth of content is occurring from a very high baseline, and even faster than we expected.”