In an earlier post I listed Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System, and, at first glance the new version looks very encouraging from an ECM perspective. As I’ve said before, I get excited by anything that can help my clients better manage their information and SharePoint has the potential to be a transformative platform bridging structured content, unstructured content and social computing in one flexible package. SharePoint 2007 does a decent job of this but it has some deficiencies when it comes to managing all content in the enterprise.

I’ll also give you the same caveat I gave last time; While this post focuses on SharePoint as a technology, technology is about the very last thing that should be considered when an organization sets out to manage its content more efficiently. Information management should start with a good business case, appropriate sponsorship, choosing the right areas of focus then building capacity within the organization to truly succeed. Technology is only the last piece of this puzzle. All of that said, there has been an incredible amount of interest in SharePoint (as illustrated by the 7,500 people who attended the SharePoint conference from October 19 to 22, 2009) and many of my clients have questions about where (or whether) this tool should fit into their ECM strategy.

Finally, the updates below are based on my attendance at the SharePoint conference where I went to as many breakout sessions as possible and chased down beleaguered Microsoft staffers to ask questions in what must have felt like a trip to the old Roman Coliseum (with the lions, not with Caesar). I tried to focus on attending ECM-specific sessions and have done as much reading as I can but as a vendor-neutral consultant Microsoft hasn’t seen fit to furnish C3 Associates with a pre-beta version of SharePoint 2010, so I haven’t actually used the system myself. As always we will continue to learn as much as we can about all of the ECM tools and technologies that are of interest to our clients but in the absence of actually working with SharePoint some of our understanding will be incomplete or possibly incorrect. I will provide updates in future posts as I learn more.

I have used a five point scale to evaluate the how well I think SharePoint 2010 meets my “Eight Things” criteria for inclusion into the ECM club. Remember that these are based on only my first look at the tool and are subject to revision as I learn more about how the new features and functions actually work.

Initial Ranking Scale

With all of that out of the way here are the eight reasons I think Microsoft has moved towards a more complete ECM solution.

1. Persistent links – The single biggest shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send content via a link rather than relying on email attachments. In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the repository. In SharePoint 2007, links break if you rename or move a file. The other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document.

2. Store once, use many – SharePoint 2007 had a nasty habit of copying content throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth (because content links might break as noted above). Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in SharePoint is the “Send to…Records Center” feature where a copy of a document is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the document to indicate its changed status (see point 3 for more on the RM capabilities of SharePoint).

3. Honest-to-goodness Records Management – I recognize that that SharePoint 2007 is DoD 5015.2 certified but the statement from the product development team that the DoD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers…who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to efficiently manage physical objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it to partners.

4. Better metadata management – Metadata in SharePoint 2007 took a quantum leap forward with the introduction of Content Types. However, managing metadata in SharePoint 2007 can be difficult especially when dealing with multiple site collections.

5. Reusable search templates and stored search results – There is no question that search is a focus for Microsoft based on their acquisition of FAST and their push into public internet search with the recent launch of Bing. Search in SharePoint 2007 is reasonably good but the tool does not have the ability to either store a “snapshot” of search results for future reference nor does SharePoint 2007 allow users to create reusable search templates. This feature would save users time by allowing them to create a search query then either re-execute that query in the future or add new criteria without having to rebuild the entire search.

6. More granular security – This is one area where SharePoint was already reasonably strong but truly deep ECM systems include advanced security features like the ability to deny permission to certain objects on an as-needed basis. The current process for managing security is a bit cumbersome but I expect this is something Microsoft is working on. It will be interesting to see if what changes, if any, make it into the final release of the product.

7. Surface the audit trail – One of the things I like the best about established ECM applications is the ability to see who has opened my documents. I find this particularly handy on status report day when I inevitably discover that I’ve made a mistake in the document I’ve just sent out (as an unbreakable persistent link of course). I can check the audit trail to see if anyone has opened the document and if not, make my changes without anyone knowing I’d messed up in the first place. While SharePoint tracks most major audit events, the list of events is not as extensive as in a traditional ECM application nor is this information surfaced through the function menu of the content object.

8. More and more mature line-of-business integrations – This should be a strength of SharePoint given the sizeable .NET developer community as well as the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem, but SharePoint still has a lot of catching up to do in this area. Organizations deploying SharePoint won’t be able to hold a single vendor to account for a series of modules (or Content Enabled Vertical Applications, as Gartner likes to call them). This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective but established ECM vendors have offerings that satisfy a variety of industry verticals and business functions. To achieve the same thing with SharePoint customers will need to research, purchase and deploy modules from a variety of Microsoft partners. CMS Watch offers a good summary of the issues associated with third party add-ons for SharePoint.

To sum up, it is clear that SharePoint will continue to have a significant impact on the ECM landscape. The question is whether the functional improvements evident in SharePoint 2010 mean that organizations with significant commitments to other ECM platforms have to start all over again with SharePoint? In the short term, I think the answer is no. In many cases, the true benefit from the investments made in traditional ECM can be realized by surfacing some of this content though SharePoint interfaces; done well this can significantly enhance the user experience while still ensuring that the strong compliance engine in your existing ECM system keeps your content safe and your CEO out of jail.

I suspect that any changes in the ECM world will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. SharePoint is a disruptive technology to be sure, but given it’s breadth, relative lack of maturity and a widely varied partner community Microsoft will help the overall ECM market grow and likely take established ECM vendors with it. As they (used to) say on Wall Street, a rising tide floats all boats.

This is not to say that things will be easy for the makes of FileNet, Documentum, Livelink and others; they have a significant challenge ahead in trying to position their products not relative to one another, but relative to SharePoint (whether they like it or not). The vendors that do this well will continue to thrive and any that choose to ignore SharePoint or do not recognize the significance of the changes in SharePoint 2010 could be in trouble.

As always I appreciate your feedback on anything you read here. Feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a note via my Twitter account at GregClarkC3.

While this post is all about SharePoint as a technology, I want to be clear that technology is about the very last thing that should be considered when implementing ECM. It should start with a good business case, appropriate sponsorship, choosing the right areas of focus then building capacity within the organization to truly succeed with ECM. Technology is only the last piece of this puzzle. All of that said, there has been an incredible amount of interest in SharePoint and many of my clients have questions about where (or whether) this tool should fit into their ECM strategy.

For SharePoint 2010 to become the ECM category killer and truly threaten the market share of Open Text, EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet and others, the new version should have the following eight things:

1. Persistent links – I’ve told anyone who would listen over the past two years (and many people who wouldn’t…hi mom!) that the single biggest shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send content via a link rather than relying on email attachments. In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the repository. In SharePoint links will break if you rename or move a file. The other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document. Rumor has it that SharePoint 2010 will include persistent linking and if it does the tool will have taken a big step forward.

2. Store once, use many – SharePoint has a nasty habit of copying content throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth (because content links might break as noted above). Yes, yes, I know that you can “Send to…Other Location” and link that new doc back to the original but this linkage is easy to break and experience tells me that the content falls out of synch very quickly. Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in SharePoint is the “Send to…Records Center” feature where a copy of a document is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the document to indicate its changed status (see the next point for more on the RM capabilities of SharePoint). The propagation of copies of documents throughout a repository is very bad mojo from an ECM and records management perspective and it is something that Microsoft must fix if SharePoint is going to replace traditional ECM applications.

3. Honest-to-goodness Records Management – I recognize that that SharePoint 2007 is DoD 5015.2 certified but the statement from the product development team that the DoD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers…who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to manage physical objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it to partners.

4. Better metadata management – Metadata in SharePoint 2007 took a quantum leap forward with the introduction of Content Types. However, managing metadata in SharePoint 2007 can be difficult especially when dealing with multiple site collections. An ECM system should be able to easily manage relationships between data in the form of cascading attributes and parent-child relationships throughout the entire repository and should also support inheritance of metadata from the container level (eg. folder) to the content within that container. I’m hopeful that we’ll see improvements to the SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) that make this possible. The other option appears to be Microsoft’s Master Data Management tool (codenamed “Bulldog”) which is rumoured to be included in SharePoint 2010.

5. Reusable search templates and stored search results – There is no question that search is a focus for Microsoft based on their acquisition of FAST and their push into public internet search with the recent launch of Bing. Search in SharePoint 2007 is reasonably good but the tool does not have the ability to either store a “snapshot” of search results for future reference nor does SharePoint 2007 allow users to create reusable search templates. This feature would save users time by allowing them to create a search query then either re-execute that query in the future or add new criteria without having to rebuild the entire search.

6. More granular security – This is one area where SharePoint was already reasonably strong but truly deep ECM systems include advanced security features like the ability to deny permission to certain objects on an as-needed basis. The current process for managing security is a bit cumbersome but I expect this is something Microsoft is working on. It will be interesting to see if what changes, if any, make it into the final release of the product.

7. Surface the audit trail – One of the things I like the best about established ECM applications is the ability to see who has opened my documents. I find this particularly handy on status report day when I inevitably discover that I’ve made a mistake in the document I’ve just sent out (as an unbreakable persistent link of course). I can check the audit trail to see if anyone has opened the document and if not, make my changes without anyone knowing I’d messed up in the first place. While SharePoint tracks most major audit events, the list of events is not as extensive as in a traditional ECM application nor is this information surfaced through the function menu of the content object.

8. More and more mature line-of-business integrations – This should be a strength of SharePoint given the sizeable .NET developer community as well as the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem, but SharePoint still has a lot of catching up to do in this area. Organizations deploying SharePoint won’t be able to hold a single vendor to account for a series of modules (or Content Enabled Vertical Applications, as Gartner likes to call them). This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective but established ECM vendors have offerings that satisfy a variety of industry verticals and business functions. To achieve the same thing with SharePoint customers will need to research, purchase and deploy modules from a variety of Microsoft partners. CMS Watch offers a good summary of the issues associated with third party add-ons for SharePoint.

It will be interesting to see whether SharePoint 2010 includes some or all of these features. Microsoft has done a good job of capturing a new market without significantly eroding the market share of traditional ECM vendors; as SharePoint adoption has increased the overall market has grown and, as they say on Wall Street, “a rising tide floats all boats.” Whether Microsoft’s ship will sail away from the rest remains to be seen (as does my ability to stretch a bad metaphor) but they were clearly not able to do so with SharePoint 2007.

As I learn more about SharePoint 2010 I will share my thoughts here and on Twitter (GregClarkC3). I also plan to attend the 2009 SharePoint Conference this coming October where I’m sure I’ll find out more. In the meantime I’d appreciate any feedback, additional information or opinions you have to share about SharePoint 2010 or ECM in general.

A special thanks to C3 Principal John Meilleur and C3 Associates Ankur Gupta and Lam Huynh for sharing their expertise in the creation of this article.

Yesterday, Matt Asay of CNet compared the recenty hype about Google’s Chrome browser to the quiet (or maybe not so quiet if you’ve been paying attention to the ECM blogosphere) reality of SharePoint’s massive expansion within the enterprise. His suggestion that Google has a long way to go to grab the attention of corporate IT groups and displace Microsoft is an understatement to say the least. He goes on to say that the trick for Google and others is to focus on interoperability if they have any hope of challenging SharePoint.

Matt is either incredibly astute or just plain lucky because it looks like Microsoft and friends have beaten Google to that punch as well. Today, Microsoft, EMC and IBM, supported by other key ECM vendors including Open Text, Alfresco, SAP and Oracle announced the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard (see also the Yahoo Finance article on this).

At this point in the history of ECM, I think Google Chrome and Google Sites are just noise from an enterprise point of view. Until we see significant adoption in the real world and some acknowledgement from Google that content has a lifecycle, I’m not going to consider Google tools as part of the ECM equation.

And that equation, in my mind, includes both collaboration and control. All true ECM tools enable both but each tool does some things better than others. Traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum and FileNet are very strong when it comes to controlling content but have not been noted for their ease-of-use when it comes to collaboration. SharePoint, on the other hand, is not the first choice amongst the records management community but provides arguably the best enterprise-ready collaboration platform on the market.

Which brings me back to the CMIS Standard.

My first impression about the impact CMIS will have in the ECM market is that it validates what I’ve been saying for a while. SharePoint will not be the video that kills ECM’s radio stars (hands up all you Buggles fans; be honest). CMIS allows organizations to legitimately pursue an “all of the above” ECM strategy and removes any impediments they may have in deploying SharePoint to supplement an existing ECM application. At the same time, traditional ECM vendors will continue to survive and thrive as they support content that requires more rigorous controls.

Ultimately, as the news release announcing the CMIS standard says, this should be all about the customer. Of course we all know that vendors don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s clearly something in it for them as well. Here’s hoping that the CMIS standard will help break down barriers to successful content management by providing the best of both collaboration and control to the benefit of everyone.

There’s a school of thought that says while MOSS is a huge step forward from SharePoint 2003, it still has too many shortcomings to be considered a true ECM suite. These include a lack of vertical applications for things like SOX compliance and CAD drawing management (for now, anyway), no ability to send a persistent link to an object, no end user-accessible audit trail, and the fact that the default RM functionality is to copy a document to the records center while leaving the original file behind.

It’s hard to disagree with this; these are all true when using SharePoint out of the box. There’s no question that Open Text Livelink, EMC Documentum, IBM / FileNet or any of the other established “pure play” ECM tools provide this functionality as part of their base offerings, and a whole lot more. There are a couple of good articles in this month’s AIIM eDOC magazine that examine the issue of exactly how SharePoint measures up to traditional ECM tools; What’s the Deal with Basic Content Services by Janelle Julien and the second half of a detailed examination of SharePoint by Mike Alsup. I encourage you to have a look.

As for my take on this, like any good consultant I’ll say the answer is “it depends”. I personally wouldn’t trust my SOX audit to a v1.0 RM tool like SharePoint. That isn’t to say it isn’t up to the job, I’d just rather let someone else go first. SharePoint also wouldn’t be my first choice as a back-end repository for highly structured documents that are part of a well-established business process like AP scanning and workflow. Again, I have no doubt that SharePoint will get there eventually, but I’m not confident that it can scale to handle the load of tens of thousands of invoices a month. Established ECM tools can do this before most of us have finished our first cup of coffee.

Where I see SharePoint playing a prominent role is as an ad-hoc collaborative tool. Its ease of use and tight Office integration is an area where most ECM tools can’t keep up. SharePoint is intended to work the way the worker works, allowing them to use familiar tools to structure information in a way that makes sense in their world. These are things that make MOSS the leading BCS tool, but many of the new features available in SharePoint 2007 mean that it is on the road to becoming a true ECM application. While RM in SharePoint is brand new, experience tells me that Microsoft doesn’t do things half-way. The tool will mature and will likely meet 80% of the needs of 80% of organizations, with the missing 20% of functionality added in by the very large developer community out there. I’m certain this is how the document-copy issue noted above will be addressed, along with most other functional gaps.

The issue for any organization considering an enterprise MOSS deployment today is whether they’re willing to endure the bumps that come from deploying software that is still in its formative stages. It is also very important to understand the problem an organization is trying to solve with an ECM solution; if your goal is to simply enable communication amongst members of a project team, SharePoint is your tool. If you need to comply with stringent regulations or are at serious risk of litigation, you want to consider a more robust ECM tool. For those organizations that already have an ECM tool in place but are starting to think about SharePoint, integration might be your best bet. And that will be the topic of my next post later this week.