Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and its lesser cousins could well be dubbed the “McDonald’s of the enterprise content management world”. The Web-based collaboration and document management platform has taken the content management world by storm. In early 2008, Microsoft said it sold more than 100 million Share- Point licenses since launching the product in 2001–and that by the end of 2008, sales would exceed the $1 billion mark.

SharePoint is also gaining ground by virtue of its familiar user interface and integration with other Microsoft Office applications and the complementary Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) offered to anyone with a Windows server client-access license. But do MOSS and its brethren deserve respect? They do, according to many enterprise content management (ECM) insiders. But caveats abound to “proceed with caution” in rolling out the solution at the enterprise level in an unregulated fashion.

Many enterprises are integrating Share- Point with solutions from other providers. “Most of our clients are using SharePoint from an integration perspective along with document management, records management, and features of other solutions,” says Bill Chambers, vice president at the Chicago-based ECM consulting firm Doculabs. He’s noticed a trend toward using SharePoint as a front-end application and using other ECM platforms such as Open Text, Documentum, or IBM’s FileNet, as a back-end repository. “The question is what role SharePoint is playing and what role the ECM vendor is playing,” says Chambers.

According to a September 2008 comment by technology research giant Gartner, enterprises can expect to see the continued coexistence of SharePoint with other ECM solutions. Gartner posited that the adoption of WSS and MOSS for mass deployment while using an ECM suite for content-centric processes and best-ofbreed Web content is a useful strategy for the next three to five years.

A portal into the business
SharePoint is more than just a traditional ECM solution, however; it’s a portal product, says Alan Weintraub, director of ECM solutions for Perficient, a technology consultancy based in Philadelphia. “It’s not a technology implementation. It’s really about how the business wants to use information.”

Weintraub cites SharePoint deficiencies in the areas of more complex tasks around workflow, records management, and archiving, where many users still prefer best-of-breed players. Weintraub also notes a number of limitations to SharePoint around size, such as the number of documents in a library and a folder. “Size limitations have to be built into a certain design premise in order to optimize performance.”

Errin O’Connor, president and founder of EPC Group, a .NET development firm and SharePoint integrator in Houston, likens the platform to a giant Swiss Army knife with all the bells and whistles. “We preach SharePoint as a service that meets the business and functional requirements of the enterprise—an application development service, a platform. It’s the biggest Swiss Army knife in the world.”

EPC Group takes a gallery approach to features and functionality so they can be re-used by other departments, and O’Connor likes the full-service solution that SharePoint embodies. “It’s a one-stop shop for all of your needs. Users have their day jobs and they shouldn’t need to be trained extensively on this.” The key, he says, is using SharePoint as a platform for intranet, content management, knowledge management, workflow, and the like. “The portal is the platform for all of these different features and functionalities.” Indeed, application development is often needed to leverage SharePoint’s more advanced capabilities. Doculab's Chambers says: “SharePoint is an out-ofthe- box, easy-to-deploy application with plenty of features, like collaboration and documentation, that are easy to set up, but it’s also a .NET development platform.” Workflow, for example, requires a lot more work-around integrations to pull information from other systems, he says.

Governance avoids dead-end data
Whether the organization is using Share- Point alone or in coexistence with other ECM solutions, a phased and measured approach is warranted. As users and industry insiders attest, the solution gets out of hand quickly without governance. Consider the woes of firms that literally have thousands of SharePoint-based websites and no one “driving the bus” around standard metadata, content management, or security policies. Records management and compliance go awry when you can’t search business records.

“It’s almost like a viral marketing campaign that goes all across the organization. You have to designate an organization or group to be responsible for SharePoint,” Chambers says, cautioning against an IT team or a lone staffer managing SharePoint in a vacuum. “You need to set up an organization that’s responsible for deploying it, implementing it, and setting up standards.”

Prior to rolling out SharePoint, Chambers advises querying users about their needs as part of governance planning. Perform a demand analysis and forecast by talking to business users and find out their needs in workflow, document management, and collaboration, he says. “That doesn’t happen today. Typically you call up IT and get a site set-up.”

Finally, Chambers says, set up policies and procedures based on that demand. “You’ll find out some people just need an Internet site for the workgroup. Some people need workflow, so you set up these common SharePoint applications.”

One-fourth of EPC Group’s client engagements are based around picking up the pieces after poor implementation of SharePoint, O’Connor says. “From a business perspective, governance is critical for provisioning sites and content, guidelines, and communication strategies.” He recommends setting up a centralized site-provisioning process where users go to one place to fill out requests, which are e-mailed to a SharePoint administrator who can approve or deny the request of that new site.

Partnering up
SharePoint’s popularity is also netting opportunities for Microsoft’s partners and its competitors as they look to supplement and extend SharePoint. Boston-based CMS Watch, a technology evaluation firm, found many customers are avoiding SharePoint for Web content management projects but adopt it for document collaboration. As a result, integrating documents with Web publishing systems is an area where content management vendors have stepped in to fill the void, offering connectors to access documents in SharePoint repositories. Other providers are expanding linkages for records management, workflow, and storage.

Getting paper documents into records and workflow is often the bane of many workgroups. On the hardware side, Fujitsu teamed with Knowledge Lake, a provider of document imaging and capture software for ECM solutions on SharePoint. Fujitsu offers low-volume scanners bundled with Knowledge Lake’s Connect image capture software. The solution provides fast and easy imaging, capture, storage, and indexing for ECM with SharePoint.

“About 80 percent of scanning is in the workgroup category,” says Jeff DeCarlo, director of business development for Fujitsu Computer Products of America in Orlando, Fla. “We’ve created this very simple data on-ramp to SharePoint specifically for those information workers that don’t have a sophisticated scanning operation. They want ease of use.”

Getting documents into enterprise systems with proper taxonomy for search and retrieval is half the battle, DeCarlo says. “The Connect software allows users to type in index data. That functionality is now being more widely used at the desktop level.” He notes that key sectors being served are government agencies as well as healthcare and financial services firms. As one workgroup adopts the solution, he says, others typically follow, based on impressive productivity gains.

At Morgan Street Document Systems, a Chicago-based provider of “digital vault” or document management services for consumers and businesses, SharePoint is the backbone of its enterprise infrastructure with the Fujitsu-Knowledge Lake solution for scanning in records such as financial statements, insurance policies, and many others for its clients.

The company has been using SharePoint since it opened its doors in 2006. Consumers can scan in documents using their own scanner or have the company’s professional archivists do the scanning onsite with Fujitsu compact scanners.

Andy Grygiel, chief marketing officer at Morgan Street, explains: “Our users don’t know the technology, but we use Share- Point and built a very robust application on top of it. The user sees a very visual representation and catalog of their information with nothing to install, just a Web browser.”

Due diligence of ECM solutions led the company to SharePoint. “We had to make it easy to get information in and make it easy for people to search and get information out. The ability to search and find things is key,” adds Grygiel.

Where’s it going?
Especially for firms that don’t rely on SharePoint as their sole ECM solution, Gartner’s September 2008 research comment recommends that IT leaders and application managers review the performance of SharePoint applications and evaluate future releases of SharePoint as a platform for content management and determine whether a continued coexistence strategy makes sense. Notably, Gartner sees SharePoint emerging as the infrastructure platform of choice for workgroup and departmental applications by 2012.

When done right, O’Connor says, SharePoint has the potential to become the dominant player in the ECM world, much for its prowess in Web-based content management and collaboration. He actually sees it replacing e-mail as the dominant form of communication as users venture out into the organization to find critical, relevant information they need. MOSS 2007 will remain strong for the next few years, he says.

While Microsoft hasn’t yet announced a launch date for SharePoint 2009, get ready.

Marcia Jedd is a Minneapolis-based marketing consultant and writer. Her website is www.marciajedd.com.