SharePoint's Role In An ECM World

What is SharePoint's role in an enterprise content management (ECM) world? Is SharePoint itself an ECM solution? Or, does SharePoint work with other ECM systems as simply a front end? The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) (www.aiim.org) defines ECM as: "the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes." SharePoint on its own can do all of the above and with third-party applications, it can do all of the above very well. However, if we look at the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) product page, Microsoft does not use the acronym ECM or mention any associations to ECM or related ideas. So, let's forget whether SharePoint is an ECM system or not; SharePoint is what it is, and it shouldn't be pigeonholed by other definitions.

What is SharePoint? At its simplest, SharePoint is:
Enterprise Content Management: Create and manage documents, business records, and Web content. Users can create their own document libraries, define extensive metadata for documents, allow documents to have versions, assign document workflows, and include such things as check-in/checkout to control the document collaboration process.

Collaboration: Allows teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis, blogs, and RSS (really simple syndication). Documents can be controlled at the document level, directory level, or library level to include security settings, policy management settings, version control, and other features.

Portals: Create a personal My Site portal to share information with others, and personalize the user experience and content of an enterprise website based on the user's profile.  Portals can be destination sites that serve as the home page for groups, departments, and businesses.

Enterprise Search: Quickly and easily find documents, content in business applications, people, and individual expertise such as language skills, programming skills, and others. Search can be enhanced through the use of metadata assigned to documents.

Business Process And Forms: Create workflows and electronic forms to automate and streamline your business processes. Workflow enhances the forms capabilities, allowing the form to both provide information and collect information as needed.

Business Intelligence (BI): Allow information workers to easily access critical business information, analyze and view data, and publish reports to make more informed decisions.

Requirements, Requirements, Requirements
But is SharePoint an ECM system? Perhaps the only way to answer that is to avoid the question and approach SharePoint by determining what your business application is and if SharePoint can make it better.

With all initial endeavors to install a document or content management 'system' of some type, it must come down to defining what process is already in place (the AS IS process) and defining what the new system must do (the TO BE process). Only when you understand these two parts of the problem can you begin to define the potential software applications. For example, if you want to store thousands of documents for several years, SharePoint and almost any ECM system will handle that requirement. However, if you want to store millions of documents as legal records, each document having a different retention period, and the documents must be stored on nonrewritable/nonerasable disk, SharePoint may not be the solution.

SharePoint's Sweet Spot
MOSS incorporates Microsoft Office components into a larger architecture that enhances the individual effort and allows that individual effort to be easily integrated into a larger group or collaborative effort. SharePoint's sweet spot is really in two areas: (1) document and work collaboration and (2) empowering the user to help build their collaborative environment. Users do not need to ask IT to build a new library, add metadata attributes, or set up and manage workflows. With additional training and rights, individual users can customize their SharePoint environment and enhance the work process in a way not possible with the large 'industrial strength' systems.

Products like SharePoint are attempting to bring control to document management by placing that control in the user's hands and making the user responsible for their own work environment. While the original ECM systems did bring some degree of control to document management, they did not always meet users' needs, and those systems could not easily be changed. While not as feature-rich as some mainstay ECM systems, SharePoint is bringing this level of end user control to document management.