I just came out of the SharePoint Conference Keynotes and wanted to share a few quick thoughts.
First, a stack of statistics shared by the various speakers:
About the conference:
7500 attendees
240 sessions
200 partners/vendors
New track for end-user adoption (running lunch & breaks)
About SharePoint:
700,000 SP developers around the world
1162 books on SP (dev only?)
4x the visual designers for next version
Over 4,000 partners in SP ecosystem
93,000 people trained by partners on building solutions in SP
1,000 people just working on SP R&D (implied: these are at MS)
General enterprise statistics - from DelBene Cloud keynote:
65% deploying at least one social software tool
84% of orgs have a remote workforce
70% of IT budgets spent maintaining inflexible & siloed systems
4 million millennials enter workforce each year
Next, my takeaway:
At the end of his keynote speech, Jeff Teper urged the audience - "Now don't you dare go home and say "I didn't know I could do that with SharePoint."
And the response of my colleague sitting next to me (a SP developer and administrator for a global company of 200,000 users, who gets my vote for Most Likely to Qualify for MS's New Certification "Microsoft Certified Architect for SharePoint" Without Taking Any Refresher Training) was: "My users already know they can do that with SharePoint. They want to know, 'Why can't I do that within my company?' MS Access is not allowed, SharePoint Designer is not allowed..."
Which is a story I've heard from many different clients and community members, and which tells me that cultural issues remain one of the strongest factors influencing user satisfaction and adoption of SharePoint (and ultimately, its maturity within an organization). And yet the track for end-user adoption, the "SharePoint Express," new to the conference this year, occurs only during lunch and breaks. There are a few governance sessions at the conference; it will be interesting to see if they cover this problem of releasing control not only of SharePoint but of the complementary programs and systems that can make it a fully-realized solution for the users.
