This is the first of several posts summarizing the results of the recent survey we ran. But first off, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to complete it!
Who
The first part asked about the group or organization using ProjectForum. As expected, you're a diverse bunch. Industry-wise, the responses are all over the map, ranging from creative agencies, engineering, finance, manufacturing, NGO's, schools, tech companies, etc. The most common (about 15%) was in healthcare.Size-wise, about half of you work in small companies, another quarter in education (teaching or research), and the rest distributed more-or-less equally among non-profits, government, large companies, and "other".
Organizationally, over half of people reported using ProjectForum almost entirely within a single group or department, another third mostly within several departments in the same organization, and the rest used it mostly across organizations.
Where
Geographically, 65% said that all or most users were in the same office or location, with only about 15% having most of their users "far and away".This makes sense considering the product emphasis on team collaboration, and considering that most people run the software internally, you'd expect a higher percentage of intra-organizational use.
And speaking of which, a later question asked about where the ProjectForum server was being run. About 90% of respondents answered either "on my desktop", "another machine in our department", or "our IT department", more or less equally.
What
As far as what people are using ProjectForum for, well over half of you are using it for some kind of intranet (e.g. directory, announcements, policies), as well as for project management or coordination. Nearly half use it as a way of collecting and sharing feedback from others on ideas or documents (replacing the n-way email discussion this often involves). And about a third use it for each of group or individual todo lists, document management, collaboration, etc. Most people definitely use ProjectForum for more than just one or two things.Just one last thing today, and that is what other tools people were using alongside ProjectForum. The most popular one reported was some sort of file server or shared network drive, used by over half of you (I know, we have to make it easier to link to files on those servers from within ProjectForum...). Chat or IM, and mailing lists or discussion groups were each used by about a third. Most of the other tools included in the survey were used by somewhere between 20-30% of you. The one exception was Microsoft Sharepoint, which scored considerably lower. This isn't too surprising, as many shops that go that route tend to mandate putting everything inside Sharepoint, and locking out other tools.
Your thoughts?
Having dealt with a lot of ProjectForum users, these results confirmed my impressions that PF is used in a wide variety of different places, by mostly smaller, predominately co-located groups. People are using it for a lot of different things, and freely mix and match it with a variety of other more specialized tools as needed.I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on these responses, if there were any surprises for you about what your fellow ProjectForum users are doing with the software.
The next post will talk more about what versions of the software people are using, and also what platforms they are using to run ProjectForum (expect to see some changes to how we do things here...).
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