Global 360, a provider of process and case management solutions, has unveiled the results of its 2011 market survey, How are Businesses using Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise.

It found that SharePoint 2010 Deployment Upgrades have increased five-fold in the past six months, and over half of respondents have deployed SharePoint "enterprise-wide" or "regionally by specific offices" pointing to its acceptance by business users.

Thirty-three percent of respondents stated that over half of the documents stored in SharePoint support mission-critical processes. At the same time, 58% of survey participants revealed that their organisations plan to or have already extended its use to manage business processes.

Both of these results are evidence that SharePoint 2010 is becoming more viable as an enterprise class application platform. The value of SharePoint is shifting away from its historical position of storing content toward one where content-based applications support mission-critical business processes.

Despite its widening acceptance as a powerful application development platform, 19% of survey respondents identified the biggest challenge with SharePoint deployments as being the "development time and effort required to build business applications".

The difficulty in development time also affects the second largest challenge of "end user adoption and training" (17%). If strong applications do not exist for end users, adoption rates will lag expectations, pointing to the growing importance of third-party developers in the Microsoft community to help deliver business applications on top of the SharePoint platform.