A new survey of over 3000 IT professionals has found  64 percent of North American and Western European organisations are currently using SharePoint, while an additional 12 percent intend to within the next 24 months.

According to the  Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), SharePoint is now considered to be a top business application -- 80 percent ranked it among their top 10 business applications -- a significant update since the March 2009 survey.

This major shift in enterprise content management direction is driven by the increasing need for team and document collaboration as well as document versioning and management with the SharePoint 2010 SP1 version.

However, the survey shows this rapid adoption of SharePoint and its resulting business reliance comes with some significant management gaps that ISVs are poised to fill.

The reports’ authors wrote "SharePoint optimisation requires several different tracks, including increased asset utilisation, data mobility and movement and storage management, all while maintaining satisfactory application availability and response times.

"Organsations must consider this process holistically in order to avoid relying on one-off resolutions that don't scale and end up costing more money in the long run."

"Clearly, SharePoint is rapidly coming of age now, and is becoming one of the most critical content collaboration delivery platforms that is driving this new era of mobile and social-based business applications, and with it comes with some new management responsibilities," said Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy.

Click HERE to download a copy of the ESG whitepaper, Managing SharePoint as a Business-critical Application.