Imaging With SharePoint And Microsoft Office By Chris Caplinger, KnowledgeLake

Since the release of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, users have realized that by using the storage capabilities of SharePoint Products and Technologies, documents can be stored, archived and used for collaboration. SharePoint was also a great way for users to get their feet wet with ECM since it was being delivered as part of the platform their organization already had in place or would likely implement in the near future.

In late 2003, Microsoft released Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. These products dropped the Web Storage System, which is used by Exchange, and changed to a SQL Server platform. The new software had many basic Document Imaging features such as Meta data storage, custom views, check-in/check-out, version history and in the case of SharePoint Portal Server, full text OCR indexing. This instantly made SharePoint a scalable, enterprise capable platform. This also instantly gave Microsoft, when combined with Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI), a story in the Document Imaging marketplace. Microsoft users almost immediately started saving documents, images, forms and anything else they could find into SharePoint Document Libraries.

In early 2007 Microsoft publically released the entire Office 2007 line, which included a rewrite of most SharePoint components. The new architecture offered better scalability and the base components for a true enterprise ECM system. The 2007 platform added many new features to improve Document Management functionality like workflow, major/minor versioning, indices for columns and content types.