Excuse Me - I am Serious About ECM -

Apparently, my rant about marketing ploysI will no longer tolerate was written one day too soon. I left out the “when you’re ready for a big-boy bike” technique. I had a call from an ECM vendor yesterday who, after hearing that we have been successfully using SharePoint for years, asked me: “do you see a point where your company will want to get serious about ECM?” Yeah, I see that point, it occurred about 10 years ago. Back then, we couldn’t afford any ECM software, so we wrote our own. We moved to SharePoint in 2005 and we never looked back.

I am sure that there is some aspect of content management that SharePoint doesn’t do as well as other ECM software, but it certainly isn’t the case that SharePoint can’t be used by serious people. It was ironic that this call came about an hour after I read a very good blog post on SharePoint Governanceby Chris McNulty. Maybe the person calling me figured that I implemented SharePoint without any thought to governance or control, and it’s spinning out of control today. Maybe he is hoping that when, as Chris put it: “I’m ready to grab the wheel” I will think that my mistake was in choosing SharePoint, not in implementing it badly. Sorry Mr. Vendor, I didn’t make that mistake, and I’m not falling for that marketing trap.

While it isn’t fair to say that we are only now getting serious about ECM, it is fair to say that we are getting more serious about the way in which we handle content. However, instead of causing me to look longingly at a new solution, I am finding more things that I like about SharePoint. As we sharpen our focus, we are looking at trying to remove or at least blur the line between structured and unstructured content. We are starting to look at information as a whole, and we are hoping to build our next generation systems around that view. We have proven that we can tie our desktop application systems to SharePoint, and I see this capability giving us a huge advantage as we start developing new systems. We can let SharePoint do what SharePoint does well, and we can expose SharePoint content whenever we need it. For example, we can maintain our customer list in SharePoint, but we can use that to drive the “people selection” process in our fat-client applications. That way, our employees have one list to manage as opposed to one for policies and one for everything else. We can also look forward to creating output in SharePoint, eliminating the capture/intake process entirely. When we create a policy document, we can build a PDF copy, put it in the appropriate library and set the required metadata.

Again, I won’t dredge up my past few dozen blog entries, but we have also proven that we can build a content-centric application totally in SharePoint. In other words, we can bring solutions closer to the dividing line from both sides. If you are serious about content management, I truly think you can use any system – serious is a frame of mind, it doesn’t come from a box.

Comments

ECM and SharePoint

Submitted by Wendy Cash January 24, 2012 - 11:18 AM

Thank you for your comments. We too have had vendors come in, trying to sell us an ECM solution. They scoff when we tell them we would like to use SharePoint stating that SharePoint is a collaboration software and is not intended for document management. Although we have not yet widely employed ECM we are still planning on using SharePoint to do so. Why would we spend thousands of dollars on another solution when we already own SharePoint?

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Its deeper than that..

Submitted by Raimund Wasner January 24, 2012 - 11:28 AM

The ECM community (software vendors in particular) don't yet get that enterprise platforms like SharePoint have dramatically nibbled away at the functionality that was once only provided by an ECM platform, hence the "when you're ready to go pro" line. You can pretty much do the same level of ECM with SAP directly (for example) then you can with most ECM platforms that act as the middleman and then release to SAP. ECM functionality is being absorbed by the mainstream technologies and delivered as a feature set in enterprise platforms, other products, or clouds . The 80% of features that people really need and want are already being delivered by enterprise platforms like SharePoint, the remaining 20% of functionality that remains unique to the ECM platform vendors is for those operating under the illusion that they are ECM "pro's", those that don't know better, or those who are beyond repair.

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SharePoint is a great ECM tool for many things..

Submitted by Joy Rohde January 24, 2012 - 11:39 AM

So I agree that SharePoint is a great ECM tool, not just for collaboration and web publishing(although it's great there) but also for organizing business content, information sharing and personal productivity.

But in reality, SharePoint can’t provide transactional ECM tools (like document image capture and management, COLD/ERM and workflow automation). Bending it beyond what it is
designed to do just makes everything harder than it needs to be.

That's why Microsoft has moved away from stating that it is the be-all end-all solution that can also be a top tier Transactional Content Management provider. For process driven companies in Banking, Healthcare and Insurance, Microsoft has chosen to partner with other vendors who excel in this area, some of whom have excellent points of pre-configured integration.

No doubt, SharePoint is a great tool. But the question is not "Why should we spend thousands on another tool?" but really "What kind of efficiences could we gain by adding an additional ECM tool that plays nicely with SharePoint?", and "Would the addition of that tool be cost justified through increased speed to market, quicker processing times, slower claims leakage, and increased customer loyalty"? That's what I would ask about when analyzing the effectiveness of any core system, ECM or otherwise.

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I kinda agree with you.. but..

Submitted by Carlos Aggio January 24, 2012 - 5:38 PM

Hi Joy,

As I said above, I kinda agree with you, however, there is something I quite don't get and I very often come across the same speech. Can you explain in detail how another layer of ECM would provide a company with "increased speed to market, quicker processing times, slower claims leakage, and increased customer loyalty" - Honestly, I've heard that a lot but never managed to find one who could truly exemplify that in meaningful words and real scenarios.

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Perspective is Important!

Submitted by Robert Pearce January 24, 2012 - 12:39 PM

As an IT pro with 23 years experience in various ECM / IT solutions, there are a plethera of questions to be asked before implementing any ECM solution. I have seen successful Sharepoint implementations, some of which are still in use and others later to be replaced because the client come into a regulatory or operational issue that cannot be met by Sharepoint and have to move to another solution.

For a sales rep to say "when you're serious" certainly implies ignorance and poor taste. However, for those who consult in this field and do not have a particular product preference, we view each offering as a tool in our bag. To be honest, most of us who do this for a living consider Sharepoint to be a limited collaboration tool, not an ECM solution. If you're happy with it's limitations and it does what you need it to do, then I'm glad it works for you.

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Nice post

Submitted by Dean Misenhimer January 24, 2012 - 1:15 PM

Nice post. I spent a lot of years at one of those vendors you mention, but certainly in the past few years SharePoint, especially with 2010, is now a mature enterprise capable tool. There will always be things other ECM's do better, but there are things SharePoint does better then them. So it's really a matter of evaluating what your budget and use case is to select the right solution.

Everyone always mentions SharePoint is not a complete ECM because they don't offer capture or other transactional technologies. That is not the model Microsoft has adopted. If you look back over the ECM landscape for the past 15 years, most ECM vendors did not offer their own sophisticated capture technology. They partnered with Kofax or other vendors to fulfill that requirement because it's specialized technology. A few like FileNet offered image capture, but it's because their sweet spots were in transactional areas like banking. Only in the past 4 to 5 years have we seen some of the larger ECM vendors acquire the technology.

If you deploy SharePoint with the proper capture and BPM technologies, you have a system that can solve many of the ECM requirements I've seen over the years. Just my two cents worth.

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A Serious Market Too

Submitted by Daniel Antion January 24, 2012 - 4:34 PM

Thanks so much for your comments. This is what makes the AIIM Community so great to be a part of, everybody here has so much to offer. I agree with the winding thread that you (we) might have to consider the things SharePoint doesn't do well. What I like is the fact that SharePoint has reached such a size, that there are add-ons to handle almost any shortcoming.

Thanks again for reading and for taking the time to comment.
Dan

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