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.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Evaluation Guide (February 2007)
http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102179571033

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Evaluation Guide (Updated March 26, 2007)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/techref/techguide.mspx

Office SharePoint Integration – Good, Better, Best (April 2007)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0d05a69-f67b-4d37-961e-2db3c4065cb9&DisplayLang=en

I use OneNote to capture everything I do in one semi-structured place that makes complete and total sense to me. It’s aligned with the way that my scattered mind works and allows me to take the bits and pieces of information I gather in a typically overloaded work day and make some sense of it all. But what if I don’t have my laptop with me when a brilliant idea strikes (or things like this blog post that seem like a brilliant idea at the time)? No problem. I unclip my Motorola Q and make a few cryptic notes using OneNote Mobile. I can either use the QWERTY keypad or quickly insert a voice memo. Once I’m back on dry land my Q synchs all OneNote content with my PC application and voila, all of my ramblings are in one place. The incredible functionality contained in that small OneNote footprint has already had a far-reaching social impact; who here hasn’t rocked out to the hit song “My One and Only OneNote“?

This is all wonderful, but what does it have to do with ECM? Glad you asked. Enabling knowledge workers (present company excluded) to capture information / thoughts / musings in a way that conforms to their way of working is the starting point for collaboration. Building a tool to do this that’s embedded as part of an overall content management application, well, now you’re talking. It appears to me that Microsoft has done just that with their integrated Office 2007 (which includes OneNote) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 offerings.

I plan to talk a lot more about the impact I think MOSS will have on the overall ECM space in upcoming posts, but for now let’s just say that I think Microsoft is on the right path. Their interpretation on the ECM space is interesting in that it focuses squarely on the user; it’s a collaborative platform that happens to have some records management capabilities. This differs from most traditional ECM applications (although I’m not sure we can really call anything “traditional” that’s only been around for 10 years) which tend to focus on providing single-source document management and have a strong prescriptive compliance bent.

I will explore the similarities and differences between MOSS and established ECM players in future posts. For now, it’s back to OneNote to upload my grocery list to the Q…