There weren’t going to be any “wow” moments, but the mere presence of 7,500 users and technical support people proved SharePoint continues to have momentum in the business world.
That was the main takeaway from Microsoft’s Jared Spataro in an interview with SPTechReport after his keynote address at the company’s SharePoint Conference here in Anaheim, where the convention center—not the big theme park nearby—seemed to be the happiest place on Earth.
Without a new project to discuss, Spataro said Microsoft brought the community together to urge people to explore SharePoint more: to see what more they can get out of the software, to use it to its fullest extent, to say, “I didn’t know you could do that with SharePoint!”
He provided some statistics off the top of his head (so there could be a margin of error) that showed 55% of organizations use SharePoint for team sites or file-share replacement, 52% use it for project management, 44% use it as an enterprise search tool, and 42% to generate business intelligence. The point? “When people ask, ‘What’s the main thing that brings people to SharePoint?’ this shows that there is a lot of usage across all aspects,” he said.
Spataro would neither confirm nor deny talk at the event that the next version of SharePoint will be released to beta by summer 2012. But with Microsoft’s next conference scheduled for late 2012 in Las Vegas, it would behoove the company to have product to demo and details to provide.
—David
