SharePoint is More than a File Share

Professional
SharePoint 2010
Development

Without commenting on how organizations spend their IT budgets on products such as Office 2007 or SharePoint 2007, I wantd to outline my experience on why organizations move to SharePoint. The reason I am blogging about this is because of CMSWire's recent reporting on how a study finds SharePoint primarily used for file sharing did not go well for those of us within the SharePoint community. SharePoint should be used for more than a file share. 47% of organizations that are primarily using SharePoint for file storage, should consider looking at the six pillars of SharePoint and how they can leverage to streamline, collaborate and automate parts of their business. ASIDE: SharePoint sales have been picking up where Microsoft Office 2007 sales have been lacking but organizations are not purchasing SharePoint primarily for file sharing?

Lack of Understanding in SharePoint Capabilities

One of the biggest problem with many SharePoint implementations is the lack of governance / planning. It's not the fault of the SharePoint platform. Many organizations simply install SharePoint, throw a few files on their and don't use it. That was my experience. I asked the Twittersphere a similiar question, the biggest problem with #SharePoint today is? and here are some of their responses:

PaulLiebrand: RT @sharepointbuzz: complete the sentence: the biggest problem with #SharePoint today is it can do anything you want except what YOU want.
about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
guyspencer: RT @sharepointbuzz: pls RT - The biggest problem with #SharePoint today is it is too dependent on Office 2007, which has limited adoption.
about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
jcvivian: RT @sharepointbuzz pls RT - complete the sentence: the biggest problem with #SharePoint today is the inconstancy of the OotB use of the OM
about 5 hours ago from blu · Reply · View Tweet
jthake: RT @sharepointbuzz: Fill in blank: the biggest problem with #SharePoint today is the one way sync between User Profiles and AD!
about 14 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
jensgc: @sharepointbuzz The biggest problem with #SharePoint today is it's lack of core CMS features - a good content editor, image scaling amo.
about 16 hours ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet

SharePoint has its pros and cons. The pros definitely out weigh the cons. Understanding and using a product is important. With that being said, one of the biggest reasons people switch over to SharePoint is that there is one version of the truth.

One Version of the Truth

SharePoint is being using by many organizations as a way to collaborate on files that have been stored on the file share. What's more important is the general paradigm shift. Users (end users, project managers, etc.) are tired of having multiple versions of the truth. Besides having multiple versions of the same file in different folders and different drives, filenames were starting to look like the following: