With SharePoint rapidly becoming the content collaboration delivery platforms of choice for enterprises and executives in an era of mobile and social-based business applications, SharePoint management responsibilities have also become extremely critical. In its recently released whitepaper, "Managing SharePoint as a Business-critical Application," Enterprise Strategy Group (News - Alert) (ESG) outlined how SharePoint management should be an investment priority for the businesses.

The new research paper, authored by ESG's Brian Babineau and Bill Lundell, maintained that with the increase in the SharePoint usage and evolution in the user-profile, considerations with SharePoint infrastructure management, security and data migrations are only going to gain importance in the upcoming days.

On the heels of the ESG publication, Metalogix Software, the leading provider in content lifecycle management (CLM) solutions for Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint, Exchange, and legacy environments, announced that it is well-placed to solve key challenges for companies that are adopting SharePoint as a top business critical application.

The ESG study reportedly surveyed 3,129 IT professionals. Of all the professionals surveyed, 64 percent of North American and Western European organizations are currently using SharePoint, while an additional 12 percent intend to within the next 24 months. This huge usage, according to ESG, clearly confirms SharePoint’s leadership in the business application market place.

The survey also revealed that 80 percent of the respondents ranked it among their top 10 business applications -- a significant update since the March 2009 survey. This clear preference for SharePoint in the enterprise content management scenario has been attributed to the increasing need for team and document collaboration as well as document versioning and management with the SharePoint 2010 SP1 version.

The survey however pointed out that the rapid adoption of SharePoint and its resulting business reliance comes with some significant management gaps that ISVs are poised to fill.

“SharePoint optimization requires several different tracks, including increased asset utilization, data mobility and movement and storage management, all while maintaining satisfactory application availability and response times. Organizations must consider this process holistically in order to avoid relying on one-off resolutions that don't scale and end up costing more money in the long run,” an analyst pointed out in the ESG paper.

Metalogix claimed that its solutions for SharePoint deliver a holistic approach to SharePoint management. The solutions are designed to provide the users with the freedom to consolidate, manage and optimize their enterprise content the way their applications behave. By eliminating operational constraints, Metalogix claims to enable organizations of all sizes to optimize the SharePoint content infrastructure in order to consolidate, scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content whether on-premise or in the cloud. The Metalogix solutions help to resolve SharePoint management challenges in three core areas relating to sStorage and infrastructure: In the area of SharePoint infrastructure, content migrations and security implication.

“At Metalogix, our team has been solving SharePoint migration and management challenges for more than 10 years. We take a standards-based approach to delivering comprehensive content lifecycle management solutions that enable organizations to increase the useability and performance of their content applications while reducing the administrative, storage costs, and operational risks associated with your growing Microsoft content,” Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy noted in a statement.