SPServices Spring 2011 Survey Results – Part 1: Demographics

I recently did a survey asking the SPServices user community questions about how they used the library, how long they’ve used it, why, for what types of solutions, etc. I read through all of the responses, learned a few things, and promptly forgot to publish the results. There is some interesting information in the responses and over the next few weeks I will do a series of posts on what they told me. While there wasn’t really anything truly eye-opening for *me* (I interact with the SPServices user community on a daily basis), there probably will be for some other people.

Let’s start with the basic demographics. I got 172 total responses, of which 105 were fully completed. (There was a button on the last page which I think a lot of people didn’t click.)

Responses came in from around the world, but by far the most were from the US:

Most respondents have been using SPServices for at least a few months and their environments are what I would call mid-sized, though there are plenty of large-scale deployments using SPServices as well.

As expected, the majority of people use SharePoint Designer, but it surprised me to learn that almost a quarter of respondents said that Visual Studio was their primary development tool.

More people are using SPServices with SharePoint 2010 than I might have predicted. 71% of respondents said they were working with 2010 versus 98% working with 2007.  I think what this says is that SPServices is still a relevant and useful tool with SharePoint 2010. It also points out that a large portion of the respondents are working with both versions to some degree.

Finally for the demographics look at the survey, a quarter of respondents said they had some plan to move to “the cloud”. This can only be good news for the Office365 team, as well as for the relevance and long-term prospects for SPServices, IMO.

Next up: How are people using SPServices?

p.s. I used Fluid Surveys for the survey, and I’m impressed with their interface and analytics options. Check them out!