SharePoint - no longer a swiss army knife?

Conventional wisdom has it that SharePoint's versatility and use case diversity makes it a "swiss army knife" for enterprise collaboration. The times are however changing.

While many newer use cases, particularly around enterprise social networking have emerged, RSG's 2014 Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software survey reveals that SharePoint is typically not getting deployed for these applications.

Consider the graph below.  Customers indicate employing SharePoint primarily for the traditional use cases for which it is known: internal web content management and enterprise portals, document and records management, project collaboration, and file sharing. More than 60% of customers report exclusive or mature usage of SharePoint here.

SharePoint usage by application. Findings from RSG Industry Survey

But SharePoint sees considerably lower usage for newer applications. Only 15 to 20% of customers report exclusive or mature usage when it comes to social networking (even considering Yammer), external website management, external collaboration and digital asset management.

Put another way, you need to supplement or complement SharePoint with other tools for these use cases. SharePoint is no swiss army knife and one platform does not fit all use cases.

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