Navigating the New SharePoint EcoSystem: What's Your Strategy?

Proudly displayed in my conference room is a plaque with an article I wrote in 1997 titled “Enterprise Document Management – Myth or Reality?” The conclusion of the article was that EDM was…”A Myth!” Thirteen years later, I am once again writing about “ECM” and while “Content” has replaced “Document,” I am pleased to say that the myth has become a reality.

Since the introduction of SharePoint 2007, the ECM community hasn’t been quite the same. Adoption has become prolific and it shows no signs of slowing down. For organizations readily embracing it, this is not a surprise and the high-fives are flying every day. For those that look at SharePoint through a competitive lens, a fundamental strategy shift has either been employed or needs to be employed, because the absence of a SharePoint strategy can make you irrelevant. This observation will have even more credence once SharePoint 2010 is released in the first half of this year.

Does this mean that SharePoint will find its way into every organization? No – but for most organizations, SharePoint will play some role, and given that fact, it is important to calibrate your ECM strategy with it in mind.

In the pre-SharePoint 2007 era, when organizations employed an ECM tool, the tool’s use was typically limited to a certain business function for a specific problem. In the post-SharePoint 2007 era, the world has changed. Many organizations, both public and private, are embracing SharePoint to satisfy all ECM requirements.

This typically manifests itself in two ways. First, there are a number of organizations that are first-time users of ECM technologies. Once they get a taste of SharePoint, it sparks a viral interest that spreads quickly across the organization. Second, organizations are readily embracing SharePoint by displacing existing ECM systems, because they see it as a more broadly accepted and less costly platform.

Regardless of how SharePoint is introduced into an organization, there is a fundamental formula that Microsoft has employed which has catapulted SharePoint to a new stratum.

That formula consists of three variables:

• Adoption – The success of a technology platform such as SharePoint is measured not only in the vagaries of explicit value, but by how well it has been adopted across an organization, and SharePoint is being used more regularly than any other ECM solution in the world.
• Ease Of Use – Users have flocked to SharePoint because they “get it” quickly. It may not be perfect, but it allows users to quickly achieve beneficial rewards. Regardless of which SharePoint component you’re using, the interface is pretty consistent and the configuration is straightforward.
• Flexibility, Freedom, and Power – It is a sad truth and one that internal IT professionals curse: Business users typically want to minimize any type of reliance upon IT. For them, SharePoint’s flexibility represents power and freedom. Does this mean IT folk should go packing? Absolutely not, and in fact, there is more demand for SharePoint IT professionals than ever, because more advanced usage requires sophisticated levels of expertise.

In terms of functionality, SharePoint has truly become the Swiss Army Knife of ECM, with a blade for almost every common ECM function (document management, records management, workflow, portals, collaboration, search, and more) and in this regard it is incredibly powerful.

Potential Dangers 
Yet, with this power comes danger, because if too many blades are taken out at once, you may get cut. To avoid the pain, we typically recommend that discreet functionality be employed to solve discreet business problems.

Naysayers will argue that the Swiss-Army Knife functionality of SharePoint is not sufficient for mission-critical applications which require specific capabilities. In certain cases, they are right; however, what we have observed is that organizations are embracing SharePoint even despite the absence of some advanced features – and with SharePoint 2010, Microsoft will introduce a wealth of new features that will make it even more viable as an enterprise platform.

Governance Required 
SharePoint’s very blessings, however, can also become its curse. Its fundamental simplicity and ease of use will frequently mask the complexities of designing sophisticated business processes. As a result, organizations can experience uncontrolled SharePoint “sprawl,” and like anything out of control, this experience can introduce challenges for the business as well as users.

The answer to this challenge is to introduce an appropriate level of rigor and formality into SharePoint projects. In short, a governance program needs to be developed to provide a framework for deploying SharePoint in a predictable, accelerated and consistent fashion. The trick to such an effort is to ensure that the governance program is light-weight, iterative, and modular. If you develop a hefty SharePoint governance bible, chances are it will simply languish on the bookshelf of someone who has paid handsomely for such an effort.

The SharePoint Ecosystem 
SharePoint, like all ECM products, does not do it all. Microsoft has always been a proponent of building a platform which satisfies the majority of common requirements. Those that don’t fall into that pool will typically be addressed by supplemental third-party products. It is here that a burgeoning ecosystem has developed around SharePoint; an ecosystem that is undisputedly the largest in the ECM community. It can be segmented as follows:

• SharePoint Infrastructure Supplements – This class represents the smaller portion of providers in the ecosystem. Their mission is typically to provide some type of performance-boosting capability. For example, BlueThread is a company that provides a product called StoragePoint, which enables file content to be stored outside of the SQL Server database (Content Database). SharePoint natively stores all content in the database and, as a result, companies have experienced performance problems. Alternatively, companies such as F5 provide network-boosting performance equipment and software that are specifically optimized for increased WAN performance and security.
• SharePoint Administrative Supplements – SharePoint 2007 provides a rich feature set; however it, along with its predecessors, are relatively immature when it comes to global administration functionality. SharePoint 2010 addresses a number of gaps and as a result, this class of providers will need to refine their offerings to introduce a different value proposition.
• Companies such as Idera, AvePoint, and Axceler fill administrative gaps that exist with the current and earlier versions of SharePoint. These products typically introduce data replication across “Site Collections” and SharePoint Farms, intelligent backup, and performance management capabilities. In certain cases, they have provided a simplified user interface for a complex command-line utility (STSADM). In other cases, they have automated laborious manual processes and introduced new functionality that doesn’t exist within SharePoint.
• SharePoint Functional Supplements – This represents by far the largest collection of providers in the SharePoint ecosystem. Their missions are as diverse as they are vast. For a multitude of reasons, these companies have introduced add-on technologies that solve specific problems on top of SharePoint. Examples include KnowledgeLake, which has a leading imaging and connectivity offering; SchemaLogic, which provides a tool that, among other things, allows for content to be more easily and automatically tagged when uploading into SharePoint; and Concept Searching, which introduces statistical search and retrieval technologies that enhance the searching experience.

The value introduced by these providers is substantive and they should not be underestimated or quickly dismissed. In many cases, their products allow SharePoint to more fully shine as a strategic information management platform. However, a word of caution is advised: Just like SharePoint, each of these third-party add-ons has its own complexities and technical dependencies. As such, care should be taken to ensure that the provider is following SharePoint best-practices development methods and has a strong relationship with Microsoft.

SharePoint Complements 
Many of these add-ons have been in use as mission-critical technologies for a long time. There are advanced features such as version-level security, strong integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office, and richer meta-data constructs. Many have also built niche areas of expertise, such as Documentum being employed for the Pharmaceutical industry, OpenText (Hummingbird) for Legal, and Hyland for mid-size insurance organizations. In this regard, their products have evolved to reflect the interests of those industries as well as others that they serve, and for these efforts, their feature sets are frequently very rich.

These products are pushing SharePoint further with customizations and third-party products (as referenced above) and it has become an accepted mission critical-information management platform. As a result, organizations are using SharePoint for much more than an alternative to a shared drive. They are driving key business functions by embracing SharePoint for the management of information.

Key Trends in Third-Party Add-ons
With SharePoint, the ECM landscape is evolving, and traditional ECM providers are scrambling to reestablish their value proposition to remain relevant. Here are some key trends:

• Records Management - Serve as “The” records management repository once content has gone through its collaborative lifecycle in SharePoint.
• Surfacing Repository - Expose or “surface” their repository and functionality set in SharePoint. In this capacity, the vendors typically have some type of configuration mechanism which allows for the traditional repositories to appear on SharePoint pages and Web parts.
• Consolidated Searching – A number of the vendors are now providing a mechanism that allows searching to take place against SharePoint and the content from the Traditional ECM vendor. With such functionality, search results typically allow for key actions to be completed.
• Workflow Integration – Some of the vendors also offer the ability to provide some level of workflow integration. It could be that SharePoint workflows can reference content in the traditional ECM repositories that are integrated. Alternatively, it could be that the traditional ECM workflows are able to reference SharePoint content.
• Single sign-on/integrated security – Most of the vendors typically provide sophisticated authentication services for Active Directory and LDAP-based directory services. In certain cases, they may more closely join the security authentication together. Regardless of single sign-on, most vendors provide some form of security to ensure that people see only what they have access to from both environments.

The points above reference a generalized perspective on what the Traditional ECM vendors provide when integrating with SharePoint. If SharePoint/Traditional ECM integration is required, it is best to understand their specific capabilities to determine the impact on your environment.

Inevitable Gripes 
As you drill more deeply into SharePoint, like any product, you’ll find things that you like and don’t like. For example, I’m forever challenged with the notion that metadata structures do not support parent-child relationships. Additionally, it is an inconvenience, to say the least, when you cannot associate different renditions of a document (Word, PDF, TIFF) with the same metadata entry. While these are a few of my hang-ups, you’ll find that SharePoint’s strengths’ compensate for its weaknesses and that you can learn how to work around them.

In fact, most people close to the product will be quite vocal about its imperfections and not just its strengths. In this regard, the notion of SharePoint “sprawling” through an organization in an uncontrollable fashion is a real issue. In the absence of controls, SharePoint farms can indeed grow completely out of control, thus negating its value. In part, governance is needed to moderate the expansion of SharePoint. Additionally, it can introduce sound practices to address some of the gaps of the product.

Getting the Most Bang for the Buck
SharePoint has undeniably changed the ECM landscape as it impacts not only customers, but more broadly, the entire ECM eco-system. Ultimately, SharePoint represents the first true Content Management platform that is enterprise worthy. Not because it handles the largest volume of content (yet), but because it is being broadly adopted by enterprises of all types. So get your facts, do your due diligence, work with business partners and/or colleagues, and plan out a SharePoint strategy that accommodates your organization’s specific requirements and legacy systems.

Russ Edelman is the President of Corridor Consulting, Inc. Corridor provides mission-critical SharePoint solutions by offering add-on business applications for SharePoint as well as Strategic Services for SharePoint. You can follow him on Twitter at RussECM. Corridor’s website is www.corridorconsulting.com.