How Fast Will People Migrate to SharePoint 2010? [closed]

Question

I'll be the pessimist on this one: I don't expect the enterprise organizations I know to do anything for at least a year after launch, if not longer. (This in one of the reasons I thought my jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services was a good idea, even with SP2010 right around the proverbial software release corner.)

MOSS is a fantastic platform, but is generally underutilized. Most organizations still aren't quite sure what it is or how to deal with it (and the majority of that problem comes from -- wait for it -- IT).

Some of the cool stuff in SP2010 looks fantastic to us SP Junkies, but executives don't want: Facebook in the Enterprise, The Shared Folder in the Sky, or Another Development Challenge.

What do you think?

M.

Answer 1

I'm pushing to adopt quickly, and positioning projects to take advantage of the new features. Some projects I'm saying "Well, we could do it now but could we wait 6 months?". Of course I think I'm the exception to the rule.

From the masses out there I think it'll be mixed adoption. They'll be a small group that are forerunners and jump on it. They'll be a middle of the road group that will probably be the 6 month to 1 year wait and see type. Then they'll be some that are still struggling with 2007 (and some with 2003) that won't upgrade at all until the next version is out there on the horizon.

I think the important thing for adoption is upgrade capabilities. It's never fun to upgrade. 2003 to 2007 was painful and very few tool vendors have produced the best toolsets to take care of this. Microsoft needs to consider legacy systems (I'm calling 2007 legacy now). If they truly want adoption and tout that SharePoint is the collaboration space they need to be serious about dealing with peoples data and provide a path. Just putting out the latest and greatest but then having to wait for vendors to fill the gap to get your data from 2007 to 2010 isn't going to cut it. It's a tough battle but one that needs to be fought.

In the interim, get the public beta when it comes out and get it into your lab environment. Bring in a subset of your data from production and see what mock upgrade scenarios are going to be like. The recent change to stsadm.exe to check your farm for any issues to move to 2010 is a good step so be sure to run that and keep your farms running smoothly.

When you evaluate what can be done with 2010 and align it to business processes to get the biggest bang for the buck take the dive. Always drive your solutions from the buisness need though and there are going to be gaps in the solution space so watch for third party vendors and free CodePlex-like projects to fill those gaps.

Above all, have fun. The 2010 system is the same kind of major upgrade that 2003->2007 was and offers a lot of great new features (and some fixed ones) that everyone can benefit from.

Answer 2

I wouldn't expect to see our company adopt SP2010 for 18-24 months. We have roughly 80 sites for our business area of approximately 2500 people, and our farm is centrally managed for the entire company (close to 120,000 employees). The major issue that we run into with any environment or platform upgrade is the sheer development and testing phase we have to go through to make sure we don't break anything anyone has done.

As you mentioned, we also have a huge hurdle to get through in the IT community in terms of actually adopting SharePoint in workplace. SharePoint is used more as a substitute for a LAN drive in our business, and only now are we gaining traction in proving the value realized by integrating SharePoint into your business processes. In our business area it is much more of a grassroots effort to get SharePoint into the spotlight... our direct IT management has failed to see the benefit for the last few years.

I found your mention of a corporate-wide "Facebook" very interesting. One of our sister business areas actually developed an internal social networking tool on top of SharePoint which has since been opened up to the entire business. There is, however a huge generation gap with its use. The younger generation wants to embrace it, and everyone else is trying to put up roadblocks to its use.

Answer 3

Only one of my clients currently will even have the infrastructure to support it, and even then I don't think they will want to adopt until at least 1 major SP is out there.

A good portion of my clients are law firms who tend to be VERY slow to adopt any new technologies. They have no problem with using 5-10 year old systems. I think the idea at most firms is that there is little incentive to be more efficient, because in the end that will cut a significant amount of their billable time. So my one firm that is considering it is only doing it because they are new to SharePoint. And I was able to convince them to purchase some beefy Hyper-V boxes to build a farm that will be future-proof for 2010. But I will not recommend upgrading for some time, because they are using SharePoint for critical DMS and records management purposes.

The other thing is that most of us really have no idea what an upgrade to 2010 will entail until we pour through all the information at SPC09. Thank God MS is making all the sessions available on-demand!

Answer 4

Large Organisations who have MOSS 2007 bedded in will be slow to adopt and will most likely wait for SP1 as they would have experienced the pains of MOSS 2007 RTM.

If they have done the right thing and followed the guidance out there that came after SP1 and haven't touched the 12 hive out of the box files etc. etc. then they may move quicker.

For new customers who have been planning SharePoint, this is a great opportunity to get on board. But again, I'm holding off judgement until I've seen the platform running in a brand new virtual machine ;-)

Answer 5

Marc,

I did share your position that rollouts would be limited, but my survey and Joel Oleson's that followed may have me looking at it in a different light. I'm sure next week's announcements will give us even more perspective.

Joel's survey is larger and is very positive towards quick adoption. What I gained from my survey is a strong reluctance on the 64bit side. I have a feeling that once people begin to feel more comfortable with the fact that 64bit is here to stay and the tools support it, they will more willingly adopt SharePoint 2010.

Tom

www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=255

Answer 6

Here in Quebec, there's still a lot of WSS 2.0 implementations and another good portion of SharePoint V3/MOSS 2007 implementations that have gone live in the last months. Therefore, I don't expect a high level of adoption for the next 18-24 months. Also, from a financial perspective, the 64-bit hardware requirement will definitively be a showstopper for a lot of SMB that are actually using WSS and are quite happy with it.

Answer 7

Wow, I think you all are missing the boat. SharePoint 2007 is the largest growing software in Microsoft's history. SharePoint 2010 will double if not triple that growth. Most of the customers that didn't want SharePoint 2007 was because of some of the functionality had to be built as custom applications. These features are now out of the box with SharePoint 2010. I would suggest that you all get on the train because this one is going to be huge. To take all of you applications and turn them into one true client portal will make CIO's take notice. But if you all don't, more work for me.

Answer 8

Gartner Group seems to agree that it's going to be a while: "Gartner believes MSS 2010 will not gain widespread adoption until 1Q12 or later due to CIO budget pressure and typical planning cycles."

M.

Answer 9

Like all things Microsoft, given the choice I will wait until after the first service pack release. There were many issues with SharePoint 2007 that were not fixed until SP1, I am expecting the same until proven otherwise.