There's no question that Sharepoint is one of the fastest growing applications in Microsoft-centric IT shops.  I've visited lots and lots of clients who not only have a multitude of Sharepoint servers, it's been rolled out so rapidly and decentrally across the the company that they have no idea how many Sharepoint servers or sites thta they actually have in use.  At many of these sites, we then conduct a Sharepoint inventory and come to find out that there's often an order of magnitude more Sharepoint servers than the IT team originally guessed.

In some ways, the growth of Sharepoint in the enterprise reminds me a lot of the growth of SQL Server back when it was considered to be a mostly-departmental database.  Back then, every department with an independent budget might deploy a SQL Server application locally.  And because of SQL Server's reputation as a self-managing DBMS, they were often left completely unmanaged until they broke.  The same sort of thing is happening with Sharepoint.  Departments within the enterprise are popping up Sharepoint servers and sites to support local collaboration needs without any consideration for long-term administration, backup & recovery, or availability.

In some forward-thinking enterprises, Sharepoint (as a information repository) is becoming a management responsibility for DBAs.  After all, Sharepoint uses a SQL Server repository to manage its data.  In other shops, administration is falling to the network admins.  But more often than not, there's simply no one administrating and caring for the Sharepoint sites.

So, I'm curious - what, if anything, is your organization doing to support and administrate Sharepoint?  Please leave a post to let me know.

Many thanks,

-Kevin