According to a survey titled SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata Survey White Paper, 34% of 396 organizations included in the survey reported using Office 365 and SharePoint Online. The survey was sponsored by ConceptSearching, and published on April 30, 2014.
When we compare this claim to an earlier one on precisely the same subject — Office 365, SharePoint online usage by organizations — we can’t help but conclude organizations are consuming the Office 365 SaaS, cloud service in substantially increasing numbers. The earlier survey was conducted by Forrester Research and published in February of 2013. The usage percentage mentioned in this survey was a mere 15% of organizations polled. Bottom line, in just one year, organizations appear to have more than doubled their usage of SharePoint in the cloud.
How does a central IT organization adjust to this trend? The most popular method per publicly available reports, is to maintain a hybrid computing environment for SharePoint. The drivers are the need for a comparatively secure method of storing documents and data proprietary to an organization and ease of use. As we wrote in an earlier post to this blog, Office 365 and SharePoint Online will not support a highly customized implementation of SharePoint. The Forrester study, which provided the subject matter for the post, pointed to the comparatively less flexible Office 365 SharePoint Online design as a hindrance on wider consumption of the SaaS Cloud service by organizations.
But a hybrid solution for SharePoint computing requires IT to support two potentially widely different platforms. For example, the ConceptSearching Report cited above claims 30% of the 396 organizations participating in the survey reported ongoing use of SharePoint 2007. For any organization within this segment still using SharePoint 2007, a decision to add SharePoint Online, Office 365 as a SharePoint computing option will likely present a challenging support requirement.
Perhaps one of the Multi-User Licensing offers from SharePoint-Videos will provide the repository of techniques and knowledge base IT will require to simultaneously support both components of the hybrid solution we just presented.
If your organization is facing the kind of challenge we present in this post, and you would like to discuss it with a third party, please contact us.
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