SharePoint in UK universities - literature review

We are currently funding the University of Northumbria to undertake some work for us looking at the uptake of Microsoft SharePoint in UK universities.  As part of this work we have just published a literature review [PDF] by James Lappin and Julie McLeod:

SharePoint 2007 has spread rapidly in the Higher Education (HE) sector, as in most other market sectors. It is an extra-ordinarily wide ranging piece of software and it has been put to a wide variety of different uses by different UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This literature review is based upon what HEIs have been willing to say about their implementations in public.

Implementations range from the provision of team sites supporting team collaboration, through the use of SharePoint to support specific functions, to its use as an institutional portal, providing staff and/or students with a single site from which to access key information sources and tools.

By far the most common usage of SharePoint in UK HEIs is for team collaboration. This sees SharePoint team sites replacing, or supplementing, network shared drives as the area in which staff collaborate on documents and share information with each other.