Using SharePoint For ECM

By Doug Miles, AIIM Market Intelligence Division

SharePoint has evolved over the last 10 years to be something of a jack-of-all-trades solution covering intranets, portals, collaboration, forms processing, business intelligence, business process management and content management. Its browser-based collaborative interface has certainly proved to be a popular option for user-enabled intranets, locally managed project portals, and community team-sites. Growth has been rapid, with an adoption rate of 60-70% across all sizes of organization and all industry sectors. However, the question of whether it provides a true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capability, in comparison to traditional ECM suites, continues to be hotly debated in the ECM supplier community.

There is no doubt that SharePoint is the first product in this area to have met the "enterprise" aspirations of ECM, with many companies achieving near universal employee access. As for the content management, records management and business process management capabilities of SharePoint, things have moved up a notch with the 2010 release. However, as we will see in this report, this has not lessened the popularity of the growing catalogue of third-party addon products and integrations that fill its functionality gaps and extend its capabilities - a synergy that Microsoft encourages through its software partner network.

In this report, we compare user experiences of SharePoint for ECM applications, including the new functionalities in the 2010 version. We discuss the issues going forward and compare strategies in the specific areas of information portal, scanning and capture, document management (DM), records management (RM), business process management (BPM) and social business systems. We explore plans for the use of third-party applications, and the positioning of SharePoint alongside existing ECM systems. Finally, we look at the governance aspects of SharePoint and the implications for security, compliance and long-term archive.