Comments on: Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to Be a True ECM System

By: Larry Oliver

Larry Oliver — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:23:20 +0000

Great article – One of the technical concerns that some prospects bring to my attention about SharePoint is the storage of documents in the SQL database instead of a fileshare or other. I have heard that might change, or be an option, in SP2010. Do you have any information or comment on that topic.

By: Brad Bowyer

Brad Bowyer — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:33:49 +0000

The one component i could never understand was the missing support for drag/drop email from outlook into sharepoint. The majority of negotiations (for all but large deals) is email based, and needing a separate technique/concept to store those emails separately actually convinced me to abandon SharePoint as a solution. There wasn’t a better answer, so no purchase… Its been a while since I legitimately reviewed SharePoint (we went off and built an email management tool), but based on your blog, I went looking to see if I had missed this capability, Note that I very well could still be in the cold, but i didn’t see it. I don’t understand how this couldn’t be part of Microsoft’s urgent strategy.

By: Greg Clark

Greg Clark — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:58:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment Tony. I agree absolutely that SharePoint has many strengths. Postioned properly in an organization, and with the right expectations, SharePoint can be an extremely powerful tool. Its extensibility is a big part of that.

On this topic I’d make two comments:

1) Extensibility is a double-edged sword. Although it allows organizations to do a lot with the tool, they need to own that customization going forward. Each time they upgrade, buy a new module or implement new customizations they have to fully test that none of their custom code will break. If an organization already has a system delivery lifecycle in place and understands the true cost of the customizations it can be very beneficial to tune the application to your needs. If not, however it could cost a lot more and lead to some disappointed stakeholders (and out-of-work IT staff!).

2) If SharePoint is positioned as a replacement for a traditional ECM suite like Documentum or Livelink there could be trouble. What I’m really trying to get at in the article is that organiztions should think twice before they try to end-of-life these traditional suites and replace with SharePoint; at least with SharePoint 2007. If SharePoint 2010 has the features I mention (and some mentioned by the other commenters below) there’s a much greater chance for success.

By: Tony Testa

Tony Testa — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:43:12 +0000

Well written article and brings up a lot of points that have been brought up before. I would have to say though that your missing a HUGE benefit that SharePoint has, which is custom development. SharePoint has been built to do the 80% of what people do on a daily basis, but it provides a large arena for custom development to handle those 20% of tasks that are specific to a certain business.

By: Andrew Smith

Andrew Smith — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:15:17 +0000

Is a good article. I think many people forget what true ECM is and SharePoint simply isnt there yet. I also think retention periods and content migration timelines are required in any good and true ECM platform….

By: SharePoint Blog by Jeremy Thake in Perth, Australia

SharePoint Blog by Jeremy Thake in Perth, Australia — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:43:28 +0000

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (28Jul)…

Top This Week SharePoint; from an Engineer’s Perspective ……

By: decatec

decatec — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:17:37 +0000

Excellent article, for Records Management security in SHarepoint I’d like to be able to manage document confidentiality levels in Sharepoint, currently it’s very difficult to implement ..