Tying Document Scanning Into Microsoft SharePoint Improves Business Process Management

By Mauro Cardarelli, Vitale Caturano

Given Microsoft SharePoint's prevalence in the marketplace, often there are differing expectations and understandings of its capabilities. How do you define SharePoint to your customers?

Mauro Cardarelli said: "First and foremost, SharePoint needs to be viewed less as a solution and more as a framework that can be used to augment new or existing ECM initiatives. An empty SharePoint repository brings no value to a business worker. The value an organization will achieve with SharePoint is a direct result not only of the content stored in SharePoint repositories, but also how the SharePoint implementation is structured. Companies need a SharePoint strategy that says we will put corporate knowledge into the repository so that others can use and repurpose this knowledge. Basically, anything that can help you do your job better – hyperlinks to Web pages to unstructured information that is currently paper-based – should become part of SharePoint."

How does SharePoint integrated with document scanning help an organization advance business process management?

Cardarelli said: "The people involved in a specific business process are the ones best able to determine at what step in that process paper should be added to a workflow. Companies don't want to hire administrators to add paper into applications. The faster and more reliably business process participants can add paper into SharePoint, the more quickly the entire organization can leverage that data out of SharePoint."