report: sharepoint user experience survey -...

Report: SharePoint user experience survey

Beyond the board meeting.

We help our customers become more effective and productive.

www.boardpacks.com [email protected] Copyright © eShare Ltd 2015

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The total governance software solution www.boardpacks.com

SharePoint user experience survey

The SharePoint user experience survey was conducted over a period of a month. The

results have helped us better understand how SharePoint users make use of the

SharePoint platform and whether it was being used to assist the trend to paperless or

digital meetings, which is happening across many sectors and countries around the

world.

After looking at the results we were able to see where users think SharePoint could be

improved, and also where users think it excels. When it came to the Office 365 questions

we got a clear picture as to where Microsoft’s Office is falling short with their new cloud

platform, but also noticed areas where an Office 365-based meeting management

solution such as BoardPacks 365, fills important gaps in the package.

Here we include some of the notable results from the survey…

Key findings

Here are some key findings from the survey:

Almost two-thirds (60%) said they are using Office 365

Flexibility (29%) was the most liked aspect of SharePoint, followed by ease-of-

use/simplicity, then features and collaboration. (Q5)

Anytime, anywhere access (73%) was the most cited reason for choosing Office 365,

followed by scalability (49%) and manageability (37%). (Q9)

Office 365 is perceived as only slightly more secure than general cloud data management.

(Q14)

A third of respondents (33%) say they are using tablets to manage meetings, a further

third (37%) say they are using paper packs. (Q16)

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Who took the survey?

In total we had 94 responses to the survey. These were from a range of SharePoint users

from differing levels of experience with the platform. The data on the location and role of

respondents can be seen below.

Country

The chart below shows the number of respondents to the survey from different

countries. The main respondent countries were the U.S. and the U.K., with South Africa

and the Netherlands following.

Roles

The chart below shows the roles of respondents. The main contributors to the survey

were from managerial, C-suite, developer, and consultant roles. Some of the roles listed

in the ‘other’ section were: technical support, systems accountant, communications and

lecturer in collaborative product design.




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Survey responses

Which version of SharePoint do you use?

In the chart below, the most popular or most-used, at the time the survey, is SharePoint

2013 (50%). Almost the same number of respondents said they are using 2010 (43%) as

said they were using 2013 (50%). Not many respondents said they were using MOSS 2007

(10%). Only a small proportion said they “don’t know” (9%) which version they are using.

Significantly, SharePoint Online (as part of Office 365) is used by at least a third (34%) of

respondents, which is an indicator of users becoming accustomed to using cloud services.

Are you using a hybrid (on-premise and hosted) environment for your

SharePoint solution? (90 out of 94 people answered this question.)

This question aimed to discover if hybrid data hosting solutions are popular with users.

While the largest proportion (52%) responded “no,” one-third (32%) responded “yes.”

The largest proportion (52%) responded “no.” A small proportion (16%) said they “don’t

know” whether they are using a hybrid solution.




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How would you rate SharePoint as a content management system? (90

answered, 4 skipped)

A content management system or CMS not only gives you the tools to organise, delete

and maintain content but also allows you to publish, edit and modify content from a

central interface. SharePoint is one example of a CMS. Significantly more rated it as good

(54%) than did poor (9%). Also, more people found SharePoint to be very good (33%)

than did very poor (3%). It is likely that experience of other CMSs varies across

respondents.

What SharePoint migration tool do you prefer to use? (Answered 48,

skipped 46)

SharePoint migration tools assist in moving content from a legacy system to SharePoint.

The three most popular migration tools with respondents were: Metalogix (13%),

AvePoint (15%) and Sharegate (18%).




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What do you like about SharePoint? (55 answered, 39 skipped)

The attributes of SharePoint that respondents said they liked were: flexibility (29%), ease-

of-use/simplicity (21%), features (16%) and collaboration (14%).




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What do you dislike about SharePoint? (57 answered, 37 skipped)

One aspect that emerged was that SharePoint is not user-friendly (25%). This contrasts

with the aspects respondents liked, which highlighted the system’s ease-of-use/simplicity

(21%). Also of note is that a number of respondents (15%) were happy to say that there is

nothing they dislike about SharePoint.




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Do you use Office 365? (70 answered, 24 skipped)

When we asked respondents if they were using Microsoft’s cloud platform Office 365, a

majority said yes (60%), a third said they don’t use it, with a small portion saying that

they don’t know (6%).

Which part (s) of Office 365 do you use? (41 answered, 53 skipped)

When asked what part (s) of Office 365 they used, respondents indicated that they are

using the newer additions to the Office Suite. As you would expect, the traditional

Microsoft Office programs – Word (76%), Excel (76%), PowerPoint (63%) and Outlook

(78%) - did better than the rest. Perhaps surprisingly the new[er] programs – Lync (63%),

Yammer (39%) and OneDrive (68%) – were almost as popular. The losers here were the

more niche programs: Publisher (5%) and Access (12%). Others mentioned were SRSS,

Visio and SharePoint Online (a previous question found 34% used SharePoint Online).




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What is the primary reason for choosing Office 365 for your business? (41


The decision to choose Office 365 for some businesses is easier than others, we aimed to

find out the main reason for doing so. For roughly one-third of respondents (29%)

familiarity was the primary reason. Scalability (49%) and manageability (37%) were

important factors for a significant portion of the respondents, while security (12%) was

low down on the list. Interestingly, not one respondent said their business chose Office

365 because of the licence price. The major factor for choosing Office 365, it would seem,

is anytime anywhere access (73%), similarly, respondents cited greater mobility (44%) as

the reason.

What do you like about Office 365? (11 answered, 83 skipped)

When we asked respondents what they liked about Office 365, the responses were

relatively few. In some cases there was repetition of responses to the question: “what do

you like about SharePoint?” Comments generally included:

licensing

storage capacity

hosting

One respondent said that Office Anywhere was liked because its licensing model was

better than the traditional Microsoft Office licensing model. Another liked 365 due to

having Exchange without needing an Exchange server on-premise. Where responses to

this question were few, the following question elicited more responses.




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What do you dislike about Office 365? (33 answered, 61 skipped)

When we asked respondents what they disliked about Office 365 a good number of

responses claimed there is nothing to dislike, however, a few themes did emerge:

administration

features

access

The gripes with administration of Office 365 were surrounding separation of admin

functions for Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Respondents cited working on different 365

environments at the same time as missing.

The main issue people had with features was that some were not carried over from the

previous version of Office, Excel was one example. The final theme, access, was

mentioned in the context of mobile access, and that if you invite someone to your site

who is not a Microsoft subscriber they will not be able to gain access.

Do you think Office 365 is a secure way to manage data? (41 answered, 53

skipped)

This question aimed to discover what users thought about the security of Office 365 data

management arrangements. The response was positive with most (68%) agreeing,

although few respondents strongly agreed (17%). While some disagreed (15%), not one

person strongly disagreed.




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Do you think cloud services in general are a secure way to manage data? (41


We posed a follow up question asking about the security of cloud services in general.

Answers to this question drew roughly the same result as the Office 365 security

question. The weighted average of 2.85 for this question compared to 3.00 for the

previous question indicates that Office 365 is perceived as slightly more secure, on

average, than cloud-based data management in general.

How does your organisation manage structured, agenda-led meetings e.g.

board or leadership meetings? (63 answered, 31 skipped)

Good information management, communication and meetings are the key to a

productive organisation. In many industries there is a trend towards paperless meetings

to help drive improvement in this area and SharePoint is often the chosen solution.

Just over half of respondents (52%) said they use SharePoint to share documents for

meetings, which is a step towards a single solution and the basis for paperless meetings.

Paper packs seemingly remain integral with over a third of respondents (37%) indicating

that users still distribute paper meetings packs. On the contrary, however, a further third

of respondents (33%) told us that meeting participants access meeting documents via

tablets.

As far as non-specialist tools and programs being used to manage meetings and record

meeting minutes, the message to take from an apparent dispersion into separate tools is

that respondents would benefit from a single meeting management application. By doing

so administrators would save time, ensure documents were transmitted securely and

enable annotation of digital documents which can then be shared instantly.




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How does your organisation track the progress of meeting actions? (63


Most organisations use the traditional method of meeting minutes to manage actions as

reflected in our survey (84%). Spreadsheets were the second most common tool used

(35%). Governance software was not found to be a popular solution for SharePoint users

(5%). Some responses from the ‘Other’ section include SharePoint tasks for SharePoint

2013, emails, Yammer notes and one that said that there is no global tracking.




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Do you use any third-party PDF annotation applications (e.g. iAnnotate) (63


Third-party annotation PDF tools such as iAnnotate have been available for a while now.

They enable notes and highlighting of documents on-the-fly. We found that respondents

generally don’t make use of these, with a small portion (10%) saying they do use them. A

fifth of respondents didn’t know whether they were using ‘third-party PDF annotation

applications,’ which suggests a lack of familiarity with the technology or the terminology.

This technology is likely to be used for board meetings, where board members are using

tablets.

Do you use collaboration tools other than SharePoint and Office 365? (63


Collaboration tools are often used to improve communication within an organisation.

Collaboration is one of the main attributes of the SharePoint platform and is promoted

widely as such Microsoft. Over half of respondents (52%) said that they don’t use

collaboration tools other than SharePoint, and over a third (37%) said that they do. It

would seem that most respondents are aware that they use SharePoint for collaboration

with only a small proportion (7%) saying they didn’t know.




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Which collaboration tools do you use? (Answered 23, skipped 71)

The responses we received when we asked what collaboration tools respondents are

using gave a varied picture. Many tools were mentioned singularly, but the only ones

which stood out above the rest were Microsoft’s social network: Yammer, and

communications and conferencing services: Lync/Skype.



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