Microsoft SharePoint Moves Into Enterprise Content Management By Tisson Mathew, Aivea

Microsoft has quickly created a major presence in the enterprise content management (ECM) market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. To help IT managers assess SharePoint as an ECM platform, we turned to Tisson Mathew, Chief Technology Officer at Aivea, an IT Consulting firm with deep Microsoft technologies experience.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is generating considerable visibility as a strong performer in enterprise content management. What's behind this?

Tisson Mathew: Microsoft is focusing on Enterprise Information Management (EIM) which is a superset of ECM. EIM encompasses enterprise application data sources such as ERP and CRM as well as enterprise content including files, Web pages and forms. From Microsoft's perspective, SharePoint connects people, process and information.

• Document management,
• Records management and
• Web content management.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check-in and check-out, versioning, metadata and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management and support for multilingual publishing.