Earlier this month we asked delegates attending SharePoint Saturday in London to undertake a survey on the future direction of SharePoint, Office 365 and their challenges around performance management and moving to the Cloud. The results make for interesting reading.

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The Results:

50% of respondents are using Office 365 SharePoint Online

22% are running SharePoint Online for all production sites

68% said that they were either using Office 365 SharePoint Online or intended to move to it

80% were already using mobile to access SharePoint

Increasingly SharePoint is the most commonly used application

The majority believed that performance was extremely or highly important to their business

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The survey shows that while over 50 percent of users are using Office 365 SharePoint Online, only 22 percent are running SharePoint Online for all production sites. However, this is set to increase, with over 68 percent of those surveyed indicating their intention either to continue with, or move to, Office 365 SharePoint Online within the next three years. With most respondents rating mobility as an important factor for business applications in the future – and over 80 percent already using some type of mobile device to access SharePoint – it is likely that this number will continue to grow.

While 38 percent of our respondents use traditional Office 365 services such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel, increasingly applications such as SharePoint are seeing the most usage (over 60 percent of those surveyed).

Recent issues with the Office 365 Exchange Online service (see our blog on How to Manage Saas Peformance, July 2015) have highlighted the importance of optimising the performance of applications such as Office 365. We were pleased to see that the vast majority of respondents are in agreement. In fact, over 70 percent rate the performance of SharePoint as ‘extremely’, or ‘highly’ important to their business. This makes it unsurprising that over 80 percent feel it is important to monitor Cloud applications like Office 365.

This being the case, it is interesting that in the event of downtime or slow performance, at least 50 percent of respondents don’t have any visibility of end users affected, whether the problem is located within the local network or with the service provider. Of the 50 percent who have some sort of monitoring in place, it seems that only local network problems are guaranteed to be flagged.

Application Performance Management can help your business identify performance issues around all SaaS applications and has a particular interest in supporting the SharePoint and Office 365 community. For an informal chat or to trial our monitoring software, please contact us.