SharePoint Content Explodes

Because my brain has been totally corrupted by using Twitter, what else but a tweet came to mind while I was reading the just-released Metalogix SharePoint survey:

"SharePoint content explodes, admins unhurt." 

Actually, by rights it would more accurately have said "Users going ape-crazy with putting content into SharePoint, admins hopeful #SharePoint 2013 can help, if their organizations will cough up the money for it and allow for decent planning time, and by the way, ANY downtime while migrating = fail."

But that's a bit too long in the Twitterverse. Plus, Metalogix Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Jignesh Shah, explained the survey results better.

The survey, I should add, was conducted right under my nose as I strolled the exhibit hall at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012. And under your nose too, if you were there. Heck, maybe you were one of the participants. If so, you know that content is king in SharePoint land these days, and the king is growing obese.

Fun with SharePoint 2013 Search Architecture

"A lot of our products are licensed by how much content you have and we've seen explosive growth," in SharePoint content, Shah said. This growth in content is reflected in the survey: 50 percent of respondents have more than 1 terabyte of content in their SharePoint environments, while 15 percent of respondents have more than 10 terabytes of content.

In one year, the average SharePoint user surveyed experienced nearly 75 percent content growth.

"We are producing more content at higher fidelity overall," Shah said, citing the increase in people putting videos into SharePoint, as well as large manufacturing and engineering documents, huge media and image files, and extensive medical and healthcare records.

Not to mention the fact that with SharePoint 2013's new social computing features, "a lot of customers are going to introduce social features—which, if we go by what happens in the consumer space, a lot of the content will include images," Shah said.

Speaking of SharePoint 2013—Metalogix asked respondents when they plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2013. Sixty plus percent said within the first 12 months. "That's pretty high," Shah reflected, conjecturing that part of it might be pent-up demand—among the survey respondents, 40 percent of people still had farms running SharePoint 2003 or 2007.

When respondents were asked what they thought the biggest migration or upgrade challenges would be, high fidelity of data was number one. That is, being able to move such things as permissions and metadata. Another challenge was downtime, which Shah said hadn't been a factor in earlier surveys. He attributed that fear of downtime to the fact that organizations increasingly are using SharePoint for content that's mission critical, and continuous access to it is crucial.

The survey also looked at some reasons why organizations are moving to SharePoint 2013—and it also revealed the biggest challenges its respondents have with SharePoint. I was also interested in the "meh" attitudes about Office 365, as revealed in respondents saying they were currently on or moving to that cloud product. (Translation: very few, on or moving.) Take a look for yourself at the survey results at the Metalogix website.

And let us know what you think, whether here (the registration process isn't that bad, honest) --or on our Facebook page or on Twitter. 

Caroline Marwitz edits and manages web content for SharePoint Pro and writes on SharePoint, Active Directory, security, and virtualization. Check out the SharePointPro Connections Facebook page! And/or follow Caroline on Twitter at SharePoint_Pro and carawitz.