Regardless of business size or industry, SharePoint’s vast tool set and custom application ecosystem is being used by both small and large industries in diverse business segments. More than 78 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint and 62 percent of workers use it everyday, according to numbers reported in our recently published SharePoint infographic. The Library of Congress, Viacom and Citibank all use SharePoint for different uses in their businesses. With such broad market penetration, SharePoint has found a way to deliver value to diverse types of organizations with highly specialized needs. Three major factors of modern business are driving the explosion of SharePoint deployments.

All organizations have documents and files to manage. The capacity for storing it all extends beyond hardware and software to the ability to retrieve, organize and edit files in a way that users can easily consume. Replacing the standard file server with a system that allows enhanced collaboration and access to information streamlines communication and the time it takes to find important documentation. Advanced search tools in SharePoint also utilize item usage data and user preferences to make finding pertinent information easier.

All organizations need to communicate. As businesses grow they quickly find that email only serves a small piece of their communication and collaboration needs. SharePoint provides the rest with activity streams, social tagging, blogs, wikis and discussion boards. For example, using a wiki to address common support issues reduces IT support time and empowers workers with the knowledge to solve their own problems. Other collaboration tools allow workers to access updates on project progress, get status on the activities of their coworkers and receive important company-wide announcements.

All organizations want to simplify IT. Today, IT is the foundation of business: email for basic communication, accounting software to manage financials, CRM apps to manage client relationships, software to build and track the website. The fewer applications and systems running and tapping overall processing power and server resources reduces the labor and cost needed to do business. Using SharePoint, businesses can consolidate multiple business applications into one system easing long-term maintenance, creating a standard platform to service multiple business functions and increasing productivity by reducing the number of systems workers need to access to complete work tasks.

With all of the benefits of SharePoint, it is still a complex system to run onsite and requires maintenance, tuning and patching. To further streamline operations, many businesses opt to host SharePoint externally rather maintain it internally. The decision is largely based on how an organization intends to use SharePoint. Our experienced team of SharePoint experts has helped organizations of all sizes determine how to best implement SharePoint for specific use cases, as well as shown them new ways to leverage SharePoint. Find more SharePoint resources on our blog and join us on our LinkedIn group for expert advice from the Rackspace SharePoint team and a community of SharePoint pros.

1. Don’t have to do it all to do it all.The hardware, expertise and support are built into the SharePoint cloud model. When you run SharePoint on your own, you’re responsible not just for customizing the front-end to make it easy for end users to utilize, but also for ensuring the performance of the underlying hardware; integrating SharePoint with legacy systems; and more based on your SharePoint use case. Juggling it all can quickly become a burden on IT teams with dozens of other IT priorities to manage.

2. Get an expert, don’t become an expert. Running SharePoint onsite means being versed in a variety of platforms including Active Directory, SQL, Windows, ASP.NET, and IIS. Your team may know a little about all of them or a lot about a few of them. To run SharePoint properly, you need a deep understanding of each and how they drive the SharePoint environment. Before you start investing in SharePoint manuals, how-to guides and training sessions, imagine how that time could be better spent building out mission-critical systems that help your business differentiate and standout in the marketplace.

3. Reduce upfront investments and ongoing maintenance. Offloading the hardware and licensing headaches to a trusted provider helps you focus on customizing SharePoint to the unique needs of your business. You can deploy without coordinating hardware implementations or navigating the purchase and installation licenses. When you’re ready to grow SharePoint in the cloud, you can seamlessly add capacity and functionality.

4. Unleash the full potential of SharePoint. When you’re free from hardware, performance, and troubleshooting concerns, you can explore new ways to incorporate SharePoint into your business. Didn’t think of using SharePoint to manage accounting workflows, did you? And, if you’re spending all of your time just keeping SharePoint up and running, you’d probably never have time to think about out-of-box uses for SharePoint or to take advantage of SharePoint’s extensibility to add functionality that more closely matches the needs of your business.

5. Access support instantly. Whether it’s an outage or a question, you have a dedicated team of pros who can answer in seconds what could take you days of researching forums and manuals to figure out. If you’re having problems with SharePoint, you can pick up the phone and get immediate attention.  As an added bonus, Rackspace SharePoint customers have over 120 combined years of concentrated SharePoint expertise backed by Fanatical Support, so customers can spend more time exploring SharePoint’s capabilities instead of figuring out how to just make it work. Our industry-leading SharePoint capabilities give customers a reliable infrastructure combined with the advanced knowledge to make it all work together.

Randy Drisgill, SharePoint Designer and SharePoint MVP and I sat down for a short video to discuss more reasons SharePoint in the cloud makes sense for business.