Concept Searching Survey Discovers Collaboration is a Key Focus Area for SharePoint and Office 365 Organizations
Organizations McLean, VA, US and Stevenage, UK (PRWEB UK) 4 October 2016 -- Concept Searching, the global leader in complex metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management software, and developer of the Smart Content Framework™, has found through its fourth annual SharePoint and Office 365 State of the Market survey that one of the primary focus areas of SharePoint and Office 365 organizations is collaboration.
The 2016 SharePoint and Office 365 State of the Market Survey was conducted from March to June 2016. 413 unique surveys were completed by organizations that currently have one or more versions of SharePoint in use or are using Office 365 in a hybrid or cloud environment.
The survey was undertaken to determine the current SharePoint infrastructure, application priorities, the use of metadata, and the use of search. An additional objective was to determine the current or projected use of Office 365 and SharePoint Online.
The survey responses indicated that the importance of collaboration has increased significantly compared with last year’s survey results, where only 16% of respondents felt that collaboration was a priority. This year the percentage jumped to 60.2%. SharePoint is still best suited as a document-centric collaboration portal, but this strength does make it appealing for migrating to the cloud, to reach mobile and disconnected users, and to improve communication and collaboration.
Collaboration is difficult to define in many instances. Collaboration can include instant messaging, project management, document sharing and editing, video, social networking, and calendars, to name but a few functions. Microsoft’s strength is primarily centered on enterprise content management or document management, focusing on document sharing features, such as real-time coauthoring, team sites, access rights, and document sets.
The objective should be to utilize collaboration tools in order to contribute value to an organization by improving business processes. A recurring issue is end user adoption. If the tools available do not make end users’ jobs easier, faster, or more meaningful, then they will not use them.
In addition to end user adoption issues, within both the public and commercial sectors, many organizations increasingly collaborate, some globally, and across state borders, communicating with a wide variety of external stakeholders. This internal and external collaboration and information sharing requires vigilance in matters of information security, data sovereignty, and the protection of confidential information or intellectual property.
Concept Searching technologies provide the ability to automatically group programmatic information assets, identify potential exposures, and apply appropriate distribution controls before information is shared, so eliminating the risk of an unintentional exposure. This approach results in intelligent, secure information sharing and increased project success.
According to Martin Garland, President of Concept Searching, “We were surprised at the focus on collaboration and its assigned priority within the majority of organizations. The cloud is ubiquitous, and collaboration is a natural progression of leveraging cloud technologies to encourage communication among internal and external stakeholders.” He continued, “Working with a large government client base, we have provided the tools to enable these entities to securely collaborate and communicate as a basic requirement. It will be interesting to dig more deeply into the subject of security in next year’s survey.”
The SharePoint and Office 365 State of the Market survey results white paper is available via Concept Searching’s website.
About Concept Searching
Concept Searching is the industry leader specializing in multi-term metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management. Platform agnostic, Concept Searching also has a Microsoft Gold Application Development competency, and offers a complete suite of SharePoint and Office 365 solutions. The award winning technologies integrated with Concept Searching’s Smart Content Framework™ encompass the entire portfolio of unstructured information assets in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments. Making use of intelligent content in context delivered at the point of need Clients have deployed the intelligent metadata enabled solutions to improve search, records management, identification and protection of confidential data, intelligent migration, secure collaboration, content optimization, text analytics, eDiscovery, and any application or process that requires the use of metadata.
Concept Searching is headquartered in the US with offices in the UK, Canada and South Africa.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Lesley Noble, Concept Searching Limited, http://www.conceptsearching.com, +44 20 3239 5302, [email protected]
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