James Watson came back to spend a valuable hour talking about the findings of Doculabs white paper “The Co-Existence of Microsoft SharePoint and Advanced ECM Platforms: What You Need to Know,” which you can find here.
Doculabs asks 10 very good questions that all organizations considering an ECM implementation should be considering. I won’t go into all of the points here but I will highlight I thought were a few salient ideas. First off, James got things started with a bang by repeating what he says he hears all the time when discussing MOSS. “Sounds great,” they say, “I just don’t want another Lotus Notes.” What he means by this is that Lotus Notes was (is) an excellent tool for workgroup level collaboration but becomes a management nightmare when trying to scale it enterprise wide without proper planning.
So, given that, what is the best way to deploy MOSS? First, James suggests that a MOSS deployment needs dedicated resources. This is significant. Because of the MOSS has been positioned as an easy-to-use tool for information workers, there is a tendency to think that departmental-level personnel should be empowered to create new sites as they see fit. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it just won’t likely scale well (from a usability perspective, not a technology perspective). I agree with James’s suggestion to draw a line in the sand when multiple workgroups start creating environments with a high degree of commonality. At this point, create a centralized support team and start work on an enterprise taxonomy.
In terms of the relationship between MOSS and existing ECM systems, Doculabs advocates a co-existence strategy. This is based on their belief that MOSS, as it currently stands and considering only out-of-the-box functionality, is probably not ready to be the one system of record for an organization. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach; as was noted earlier SharePoint may very well fit the bill in certain use cases where collaboration is the key requirement. It will likely evolve over time but, in Doculabs opinion, there will be a place in the market for fully-fledged ECM tools for a long time to come.
This is consistent with what I have been seeing from my clients as well. Most recognize the power of MOSS but also realize that more robust records managment requirements are likely going to require a more mature tool for the foreseeable future. Co-existence can help provide a ‘best of both worlds’ approach that satisfies most if not all business requirements.
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