<p>For many organizations, deploying Microsoft's SharePoint content management and collaboration software has been an unplanned, underdeveloped, unloved, but not unpopular endeavor, say industry experts.</p><p>SharePoint entered a lot of public-sector agencies through small, independent workgroups and has grown very rapidly but in an unstructured manner. Although Microsoft positioned SharePoint as a platform, most users didn't treat it that way, installing the software more as a stand-alone application, said John Mancini, president of AIIM, a global non-profit association that supports the information management community.</p><p>However, they found out they needed a lot of third- party extensions to make SharePoint achieve its full potential. "So, I think there is a growing realization that it is a platform, and you build upon a platform and add things to make it achieve the things you want it to achieve," Mancini said.</p><p>SharePoint users primarily use it for internal collaboration, file replacement and to help in posting content to Web portals and intranet sites, according to a recent global survey of AIIM members, which included representatives of government agencies, mainly in North America and Europe.</p><p><a href="http://gcn.com/articles/2012/12/10/sharepoint-2013-migration.aspx">Keep reading...</a></p>