The hype cycle has started for the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 and
I’m certainly not the only one to get caught up in it. I’m excited about
anything that can help my clients better manage their information and I’ve
always seen SharePoint as a potentially transformative platform bridging
structured content, unstructured content and social computing in one flexible
package.
The current release of SharePoint does a decent job of this, but in my
opinion and others it has some shortcomings as a true Enterprise Content
Management (ECM) platform. For SharePoint 2010 to become the ECM category killer
and truly threaten the market share of Open Text, EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet
and others, the new version should have the following eight things:
1. Persistent links.
I’ve told anyone who would listen over the past two
years (and many people who wouldn’t [hi Mom!]) that the single biggest
shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique
object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send
content via a link rather than relying on email attachments.
In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has
its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the
repository. In Share- Point, links will break if you rename or move a file. The
other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of
compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters
of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document.
2. Store once, use many.
SharePoint has a nasty habit of copying content
throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth
(because content links might break as noted above). Yes, I know that you can
“Send to … Other Location” and link that new document back to the original, but
this linkage is easy to break and experience tells me that the content falls out
of sync very quickly.
Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in
SharePoint is the “Send to … Records Center” feature where a copy of a document
is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than
either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the
document to indicate its changed status (see the next point for more on the
records-management capabilities of SharePoint).
The propagation of copies of documents throughout a repository is very bad
mojo from an ECM and records management perspective and it is something that
Microsoft must fix if SharePoint is going to replace traditional ECM
applications.
3. Honest-to-goodness records
management.
I recognize that SharePoint
2007 is DOD 5015.2 certified, but the statement from the product development
team that the DOD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers … who would
like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with
particular 5015.2-oriented features but are not required to run their system in
a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to manage physical
objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they
are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it
to partners.
4. Better metadata management.
Metadata in SharePoint 2007 took a quantum
leap forward with the introduction of Content Types. However, managing metadata
in SharePoint 2007 can be difficult especially when dealing with multiple site
collections.
An ECM system should be able to easily manage relationships between data in
the form of cascading attributes and parent-child relationships throughout the
entire repository and should also support inheritance of metadata from the
container level (i.e., folder) to the content within that container. I’m hopeful
that we’ll see improvements to the SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) that
make this possible. The other option appears to be Microsoft’s Master Data
Management tool (code-named “Bulldog”) which is rumored to be included in
SharePoint 2010.
5. Reusable search templates and stored search results.
There is no
question that search is a focus for Microsoft based on their acquisition of FAST
and their push into public internet search with the recent launch of Bing.
Search in SharePoint 2007 is reasonably good but the tool does not have the
ability to either store a “snapshot” of search results for future reference nor
does Share- Point 2007 allow users to create reusable search templates.
This feature would save users time by allowing them to create a search query,
then either re-execute that query in the future or add new criteria without
having to rebuild the entire search.
6. More granular security.
This is one area where SharePoint was already
reasonably strong but truly deep ECM systems include advanced security features
like the ability to deny permission to certain objects on an as-needed basis.
The current process for managing security is a bit cumbersome but I expect this
is something Microsoft is working on. It will be interesting to see what
changes, if any, make it into the final release of the product.
7. Surface the audit trail.
One of the things I like the best about
established ECM applications are the ability to see who has opened my documents.
I find this particularly handy on status report day when I inevitably discover
that I’ve made a mistake in the document I’ve just sent out (as an unbreakable
persistent link, of course).
I can check the audit trail to see if anyone has opened the document and if
not, make my changes without anyone knowing I’d messed up in the first place.
While SharePoint tracks most major audit events, the list of events is not as
extensive as in a traditional ECM application nor is this information surfaced
through the function menu of the content object.
8. More and more mature line-of-business
integrations.
This should be a
strength of SharePoint given the sizeable .NET developer community as well as
the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem, but SharePoint still has a lot of
catching up to do in this area. Organizations deploying SharePoint won’t be able
to hold a single vendor to account for a series of modules (or “Content Enabled
Vertical Applications,” as Gartner likes to call them).
This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective, but
established ECM vendors have offerings that satisfy a variety of industry
verticals and business functions. To achieve the same thing with SharePoint,
customers have to research, purchase and deploy modules from a variety of
Microsoft partners. CMS Watch offers a good summary of the issues associated
with third party add-ons for SharePoint.
It will be interesting to see whether SharePoint 2010 includes some or all of
these features. Microsoft has done a good job of capturing a new market without
significantly eroding the market share of traditional ECM vendors; as SharePoint
adoption has increased the overall market has grown and, as they say on Wall
Street, “a rising tide floats all boats.” Whether Microsoft’s ship will sail
away from the rest remains to be seen (as does my ability to stretch a bad
metaphor), but they were clearly not able to do so with SharePoint 2007.
Greg Clark is a principle at C3 Associates Inc. of
Calgary, Alberta, and an instructor at the University of
Calgary.