Dave Larson from Project Leadership Associates presented his perspective on the viability of SharePoint as an ECM platform. He started with a brief history of SharePoint and highlighted some of the improvements in MOSS 2007 over past versions. His review was very similar to some of the presentations I’ve given in the past which can be found here.
Dave ran a bit short on time (AIIM runs a tight ship) and was only able to talk about two of the three case studies he had to present. His first example was about the IS department of a global investment firm based in Chicago. They had no incumbent document management solution in place and decided to use MOSS exclusively; their plan is to replace their disorganized network share with SharePoint. Dave reported that the users found that they were better able to find documents and appreciated the ability to collaborate using discussion forums and other tools. A question came up about the training and change management requirements for a MOSS implementation of this kind. Dave didn’t have a lot of information on this but indicated that things had gone well.
My take on this is that IT users are far more likely to willingly adopt a tool like SharePoint because they’re more likely to embrace new technology. In this case, it also seems like there was a very strong use case for SharePoint and it solved a pressing business problem. This approach ties in to what Peggy said in her opening remarks; ECM is most successful when groups act locally while thinking globally. If this is the case here, the structure created for the IT group will have been built with scalability in mind. It would be interesting to be able to look into a crystal ball and see whether this solution is successfully deployed to other functional areas in the organization in the future. This is the big challenge for many ECM deployments regardless of platform. It also brings us back to the question that keeps coming up; whether MOSS can handle some of the “heavy lifting” ECM requirements like records management and integrated compliance. In the case of the IS department, these considerations are either non-existent or at least secondary to enabling collaboration, which has led to a successful implementation. My feeling is that MOSS will get there eventually, it’s just not there yet based on the cases I’ve seen.
Dave’s presentation and all other presentations will be posted on the AIIM website and I’ll provide a link when it becomes available.
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