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Been a busy month, complete with vacation and lots of meetings to let me know how much I missed over my vacation. One of those meetings interfered with my ability to participate in last week’s Twitter ECMJam hosted by AIIM. This is a shame as the topic was SharePoint and ECM.

SharePoint is an extremely important topic, mostly because it is so pervasive that any company or vendor that ignores it could get swept away. I even recently wrote an article for CMS Wire on how SharePoint could be a useful part of Information Management if we take it as it is, not as the marketing dictates.

I thought I would take time to answer the questions from the last tweet jam and see if I could provoke a response.

1. Is there a problem with SharePoint expectations, marketing, or the product itself? The problem is the expectations and the marketing that is driving them. SharePoint is a fine tool. It does a lot of things “good enough”. It just can’t do everything and shouldn’t be deployed willy-nilly. Blame Microsoft and their minions.
2. SharePoint Governance, how do you do it for real? The short answer is plan. When we deploy other Information or Content Management solutions, we plan things out. That step is often skipped with SharePoint. Governance isn’t new; it is just ignored with SharePoint. Now that we have identified it as a problem, there is a large focus on Governance. The problem isn’t that SharePoint needs more or different Governance from other systems, it is that people ignored it. Again, blame Microsoft and their minions.
3. Is there/has there been a backlash vs. SharePoint? Yes, and it is understandable. As an experienced Information Management professional, I see people rush in with SharePoint as the answer all the time without thinking about the impact or the actual question. I see people claim that it can do all sorts of things that it can’t actually deliver. It makes me a little bitter. Blame analysts and over-scoped projects that failed.
4. What does SharePoint do well out-of-the-box? What doesn’t it do? It is great at basic document management and basic collaboration. Need a team site or a project site, SharePoint does that well. You want Business Process Management, Business Intelligence, Records Management, or Web Content Management; get ready to roll up your sleeves.
5. Can SharePoint solve Collaboration and Document Management problems for larger companies, as well as smaller? Can/does it really scale? If the backend is properly architected, it can. Many of the scalability issues can be dealt with if you can logically use multiple sites. A large company doesn’t necessarily have dramatically larger teams; they just have a lot more of them. Once you take care of the blobs in the database, you can do quite a bit. The real problem is that it isn’t that simple in larger companies. You need to integrate with other systems and have to worry about Retention and Records Management. This is where some attention to detail is required.

Love it or hate it, those are my thoughts and who to blame as appropriate. If you want to see what others were thinking during the chat, Mark Owen collected a large number of tweets and organized them for everyone’s enjoyment.