Opportunities with Share Point

This graph has been taken from a well-known job portal “indeed.com” that shows statistics of job opportunities in SharePoint from the year July 2005 to January 2010. As you can see the above graph, the growth of SharePoint related jobs in the past 5 years has been phenomenal. Meanwhile, technologies such as Lotus Notes and Domino, Oracle WebCenter, IBM WebSphere and others have declined or stayed about the same.


This is an obvious indication that businesses see the value in SharePoint and are deploying it in their organizations. The curve moving upward in the 2007 time frame shows that SharePoint Server 2007 was a huge decision driver, with its wide feature set. I believe we’ll see another push upward during the upcoming year 2011 as SharePoint 2010 expands on features and enriches ones already present in the former version.

Here are two other trends that have caught SharePoint user’s attention:

• Self-service BI (Business Intelligence)

• BPM (Business Process Management)

Self-service Business Intelligence gives end users (rather than IT) all the power in performing analysis to gain insight into their business. Microsoft is leveraging SharePoint and Excel tools that users are very familiar with, to deliver sophisticated results. Experts think this will continue to grow, as people don’t want to depend on a business analysts or someone else in IT to build cubes, charts, slicers and analyse their data.

BPM stands for Business Process Management. There are vendors that focus specifically on BPM. Experts think Microsoft is weak in this area right now but they had also observed Microsoft struggling along to provide their perspective on how BPM should be done. BPM uses a combination of technologies to automate business processes. Some are machine-specific (like workflows) while other actions require user interaction (forms, for example). SharePoint is Microsoft’s “human” component for BPM and, for now, they have decided to leverage partners (3rd party vendors) for the machine-specific actions. You can expect for more coming in the next 2-3 years on BPM.

To learn more on Microsoft’s approach to BPM, visit here: http://www.microsoft.com/soa/bpm/default.aspx

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a job, a way to become more valuable in the market or just expand your skillset, SharePoint is an excellent choice of technology. From the chart, you can see it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. There are upcoming trends like cloud computing, self-service BI, and BPM. Since Microsoft leverages SharePoint for all of those, it definitely won’t be a waste of time.

Contributed By:
Zakir Chougle
Software Engineer, Octaware Technologies