Introduction -
SharePoint which is widely seen as the collaborative tool for
enterprise management has recently seen a burst of new features added to it.
SharePoint is now not only a collaborative tool but also a Record management,
content management tool.
But somewhere in the essence, SharePoint is much more of a
collaborative tool with some added features. Documentum, on the other hand, is
more of a record and content management tool, with some added features for
collaboration like federation and eRoom etc.
Today companies are looking forward to finding Hybrid solutions,
to integrate these niche products, which will provide expert solutions in their
own domain. This article is the first step towards it covering
some of the misconceptions about SharePoint. In future article, we
will discuss SharePoint and Documentum plus, how we can integrate them-
1. Personal Content Management Tool
2. SharePoint can Scale
3. Bigger the company, better the support
4. Seamless integration
5. Back-end support
One reason for
SharePoint success is because of its easy setup and seamless integration, with
the inbuilt support for the database. One can easily setup the personal space
for collaboration in SharePoint. This can be a fairly time-consuming task in
other ECM tools. But as said earlier, this major feature of SharePoint is not
really a content management feature like Documentum's eRoom. 'eRoom' not only
provides the collaborative environment, that makes sharing fast but also other
content management features out of the box like, consistent taxonomy, security
and indexing and other content management features. Currently, in its initial
state SharePoint may not provide these features.
SharePoint is also
known for its flexibility, which enables it to be adapted for different
environments, but also for its scalability. Apart from this, there are case
studies in a real world, where SharePoint broke down and required additional
indexing somewhere in the 5,000 to 10,000 document range both for performance
and user. navigation. If you consider your organization relying on ECM
solution, then 5 to 10 thousand documents is typically just a portion of your
repository. This may be a cause of concern.
- Bigger the company, better the support -
It fairly reasonable
to assume that the market giants having leading market shares are in the
position to provide the premium solution to the industry. This includes the
long-term decision as compared to smaller, more niche driven vendors. As
Microsoft, is a huge vendor with a dominant client base, would seem to be
positioned as the best ECM solution. However, it should be further
noticed that much of the success of Microsoft SharePoint has been in the
extension of Microsoft Office/Outlook and focused on collaboration, not
necessarily in true ECM. For the enterprise looking forward to ECM
solution, SharePoint may not suits it purpose.
Another myth in this
chain is that SharePoint has seamless integration and bundle of features to
support. This is true in all essence but considering the third party
integration or inbuilt support for features like SharePoint does not support
the storage of its documents in multiple formats like Documentum out of the
box. Microsoft has a tendency to create a virtual boundary around its products
for integration with third party tools and tends to lean towards its own list
of products.
Since the initial use
of SharePoint is because the client got it "free" with Windows
Server. It should be noted that SharePoint is dependent and will always
be dependent on a Microsoft back-end, which will require the MS SQL server an
additional cost for true ECM implementations.
As for SharePoint,
Microsoft will be reluctant to provide any support for third party databases
like oracle etc. Some of these can be -
- Support
for Windows Server only and not Linux
- Support
for SQL Server only and not third party databases
- Support
for .Net only and not other technologies.
- Support
for Microsoft formats only and not complete support for non-Microsoft
formats (PDF and XML etc.)
Although, SharePoint is majorly a collaborative tool, with ample
amount of features. It has also endless possibilities associated with it. It is
a powerful tool for collaboration, yet very flexible and scalable. We have seen
Microsoft providing excellent support to SharePoint, as long as it is
integrated with other Microsoft product. Yet, it will take some time for
SharePoint, to mature and provide advanced features, and third party support to
other tools for content management.
Comments
Post a Comment