The Results are in… Are you Prepared for SharePoint 2010?

One of the most fascinating things from my recent webcast  was the interactive real time survey in the preparing for upgrade session.  With over 1000 registered and around 450 online at peak we had an incredible sampling.  I had a chance to digest these results and wanted to share this information.  It’s amazing how much you’d have to pay to get this kind of data. 

• By the way the next webcast is with Steve Walch, Notes Migration Expert on “Streamline your Migration of Complex Notes Applications” on Sep 1.
• Also don’t miss the Preparing for SharePoint 2010 whitepaper, Preparing for Upgrade of SharePoint 2010 deck and webcast archive and the post webcast Q&A blog

When do you plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010?

Let’s take this first question…  An impressive 65% plan to upgrade in the first year!  I know the focus of my efforts around SharePoint and the community is around planning and upgrade.  You’ll see me and my efforts with Quest and the community on upgrade.  I want to make sure people are taking advantage of the technology.  The other parts that are impressive about this is most have NOT seen much of it beyond a video or two.  Lots of good buzz and a cutting edge group.

 

What is the size of your SharePoint Environment (in GB)?

This was a question I came up with.  I’m always curious to find the distribution of sizes of environments.  Very interesting to see the nearly equal distribution.  The important thing as well is most do know, or think that know.  That’s great.  Couple of good one’s here.  Nearly 22% of environments are less than 50GB and 16% more than a TB.  I think most Microsoft estimates are there are a TON of small environments.  When you look at environments at this scale, you can see at least those who would attend a preparing for 2010 talk would represent all sizes of environments with an emphasis on the larger ones, but definitely a wake up call that scale is important and it is definitely a reality.  Everyone is challenged with disk storage and scaling their environments from the person managing a single SharePoint box to the multi mega farms with TBs and TBs of info where SANs can’t provide storage fast enough and you find fabric managers.  Pretty cool to see the largest group at 250-1TB.  There are a ton of lessons to learn and to experience at the more than 100GB size of environment and the majority here definitely represents *REAL* SharePoint deployments.  No cracker jacks.   The other thing I find when walking through this list, the consultants are listing themselves with the 0-50GB bucket as well, so this represents some real experience as well.  Their day job isn’t with that small environment.  I hope people who build tools do read this, hey real environments are of all sizes, so make sure you test the really big ones, cause they are well represented.  A large sample data size needs to be more than 100GB.

Do you plan to move to SharePoint Server in SharePoint 2010?

What does this tell us?  Do WSS people not attend webcasts?  Is WSS overshadowed by MOSS/SharePoint Server.  Are people embarrassed to say they do WSS?  80+% Say they are already using SharePoint Server, MOSS, ala the Portal technology.  Amazing!  The answer to this question surprised me.  I was really interested in making sure the wording wasn’t confusing, and revised this question a couple of times to make sure those on previous versions understood the question.  Not that many PLAN to use WSS.  For partners building product this is an important answer, it tells us to focus on the enterprise deployments.  It tells us that people are paying for SharePoint and it really is Core Infrastructure and everyone needs to get use to it.

How many corporations or organizations were represented in this poll?

While this wasn’t a question, I sorted those that responded to the questions with the most responses copied the email addresses into their own worksheet, did a text to columns with the @ being a delimiter and then sorted the domains alphabetically, then ran a subtotals, copied visible cells and got a count.  I’m sure that little exercise is one of the most common functions in excel 🙂 (Still works in Excel 2010, but I did have to re-add the select visible cells buttons, one of my favorites.)  Enough of that.  The totals were at 287 unique domains from the 355 responses.  So that gives you an idea of how many unique organizations were represented.  To make this even more credible, 12 responses were from hotmail, 5 from yahoo.com and 6 from gmail.  So realistically there were very close to ~300 organizations represented in this poll.

 

Thomas Resing have recently been working on a SharePoint 2010 Adoption Survey…

I encourage you to take the poll to increase the relevancy… (Used with permission… results so far with 32 respondents)

So nearly half of those who answered the question have run the preupgradecheck, that’s pretty good.  When I first looked at this a few weeks ago it was at 30%.  As well the 64 bit question was much lower, so I’m glad to see we are in better shape.  The survey itself isn’t for financial gain.  This one gives the consultants insight into the challenges their customers will be facing and as we all try to anticipate the issues and adoption.

Jeremy Thake expert SharePoint Dev from Perth did an extensive survey to try to understand the tools that developers use.  You can see the results from his SharePoint implementation approach survey and results from the SharePointDevWiki.com.  While I wish I could have fixed up his admin toolset choices, the results are still quite interesting with a few aha moments.  Very useful information.  Thanks for sharing Jeremy, and thanks for lunch after the user group in Perth.  You guys are amazing.  I’ll host this time, my treat!

He’s currently looking for people to fill out his latest survey “SharePoint Application/Content Lifecycle Management.”

One of my favorites from his results is the RAM question for the dev environments.  I tell people you gotta have 4, and things won’t even start appropriately if you don’t give it 2GB.  My preference these days is 8GB which is impressive to see at 20%.

Surveys and Polls are great.  Thanks for contributing… These wouldn’t be worth anything if no one contributed.