A  national survey sponsored by solutions provider OBS has found increasing investment in Microsoft SharePoint throughout Australian organisations.

The survey was conducted during June 2011 resulting in over 300 respondents representing a cross section of public and private sector organisations. 

This year’s survey revealed a rapid uptake in SharePoint 2010 with the number of organisations deployed at 36%, up from 4% for the same time last year.  Office 2010 deployment has reached a respectable 46% within the surveyed organisations, which suggests a strong link between SharePoint and Office deployment.

While most  organisations initially deploy SharePoint for collaboration (87% of respondents), the survey indicated a strong appetite for organisations to deliver more using SharePoint. Areas targeted for investment over the next three years include; the use of SharePoint for Internet Web Sites (45%), Business Process automation (47%). and as a Business Intelligence platform (21%).

Another indicator of the growing importance of SharePoint within organisations is the growth in significantly sized installations. This year’s survey saw a rise in the number of organisations with five SharePoint Servers or more to over 20%, up from 13% last year.

Finally, organisations are continuing the trend towards outsourcing their SharePoint implementation and development work to third parties, with in-house use of skills dropping to 45% down from 53% in 2010.

“The National SharePoint Survey supports many of the trends we are seeing in working with OBS customers across Australia”, said Andy Neumann, Managing Director, OBS.

“SharePoint has gone from a collaboration tool, to a major application platform in a short amount of time, and we see no slowing of that trend into 2012”, said Mr Neumann.