Bamboo is currently conducting a survey of customers and site visitors.  We invited over 20,000 individuals to participate, and one lucky respondent is going to win an iPad.  There is still time for you to share your opinions and win a prize.  Please visit bamboo.questionpro.com now to join in.

The primary goal of this survey is to learn how to better serve our customers.  We want to know both what we're doing well, and where we need to improve.  We are also looking to customers and SharePoint users in general to tell us about the products and solutions they need most.  We will lean heavily on this input as we continue to build out our product roadmap.

One of the key questions for Bamboo at this moment is, "When do you plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010?"  SharePoint 2010 is obviously white-hot at the moment.  There are dozens of conferences and events dedicated to SharePoint 2010, and everybody is talking about it.  At the same time, it's been a matter of some debate whether SharePoint 2010 is relevant to most organizations over the next 12-24 months.  Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint.com recently wrote:

"SharePoint 2010 will not be relevant for most people for at least two, if not three years… and you can quote me on that."

– Mark Miller, EndUserSharePoint.com

This has been a hot topic of discussion internally at Bamboo for at least the past 12 months.  When do we focus our resources on building products exclusively for SharePoint 2010?  How long do we continue support for legacy versions of SharePoint?  How soon do our support engineers need to be trained on SharePoint 2010?  Will customers slow down their buying while they figure out what additional functionality they will need for SharePoint 2010?

I suppose it is still a matter of opinion and degree at this point, but now we have some real data to work with.  We asked respondents, "When will your organization upgrade to SharePoint 2010?"  As of today, 1,342 respondents answered, and here is what they told us:

Personally, I am extremely bullish about SharePoint 2010.  My hypothesis is that social functionality is the key feature set driving the adoption of SharePoint in general.   The improvements in social functionality from MOSS to SharePoint 2010 are dramatic, transformative, stark.  Companies that want to reap the productivity gains from social networking within the enterprise are going to run, not walk to adopt SharePoint 2010.

That being said, I was fairly stunned to learn that nearly 20% of our customers and site visitors have either already upgraded or are currently working on rolling out SharePoint 2010.  To me that's big news and makes me want to call my broker and buy more stock in Microsoft.

The rest of the adoption curve also looks pretty strong.  The fact that less than 14% of those surveyed are putting off an upgrade for more than a year is really compelling.  I think Mark Miller has just been proven wrong, but I admit that reasonable people might disagree.

So are companies that have SharePoint slowing down their investment in add-ons and applications to see if they can get the functionality they want from SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box?  We asked that question too, and the answer seems pretty clear:

More than 1/3 of survey respondents said "Yes", we are delaying investments in our current SharePoint deployment in anticipation of an upgrade to SharePoint 2010.  At Bamboo, we certainly anticipated this pause in purchasing while organizations focus on leveraging all of the new functionality in SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box.  This is the main reason we are offering a free upgrade to the SharePoint 2010 version of all Bamboo components purchased for legacy versions of SharePoint.   Anecdotally however, it seems like many organizations are still taking a wait-and-see approach. 

There's much more fascinating data coming out of the Bamboo customer survey.  I'll continue to blog about the results over the next few days.  If you haven't had a chance to provide your own responses yet, please do.  We will close the survey on August 31^st.  Prize winners will be announced on or about September 15^th.  Thank you to everyone who has participated already.