Having spent three and-a-half days in Southern California at the SharePoint conference I have two choices about the level of detail to go into on this topic: Provide a high-level summary of what I learned or write a 50,000 word thesis on all things Microsoft.
Mercifully, I've done the former for two reasons: 1) Your sanity, and 2) the fact that my wife and kids arrive in a few hours for a weekend at Disneyland.
So, without further ado here is an update to my last post: Five Things I Hope to Learn at the 2011 SharePoint Conference.
Conference Overview
SharePoint is a big deal. I know that's not exactly news so let's call it a half. The important thing to know is that there were over 7,000 attendees at the conference which says a lot about two things; the breadth of the SharePoint platform and the level of interest in the tool.
One trend I noted at this conference that was different from the past two I have attended was an increased emphasis on governance, and not just typical IT infrastructure governance. In the keynote there was a clear shift from the message that "SharePoint lets end users do what they want" to "it's important to consider end user demands AND governance."
I certainly have my own thoughts about the maturity and understanding of the various governance concepts within the Microsoft community but fellow AIIM blogger Nick Inglis has already provided an excellent summary on this topic.
I see this shift as a starting point for Microsoft to move SharePoint from a tool focused on the IT department toward becoming a truly enterprise tool, but this is still a long way off. I hasten to add that I am not referring to it's ability to technically scale. As Nick notes, SharePoint can scale to tens or hundreds of millions of objects and there were a lot of sessions about how to make it do that.
What was missing was much discussion about WHY you should make SharePoint scale to millions of objects. As I hope I've communicated in the past, the biggest question in any ECM implementation is not how to do something but why it should be done, as in "why will this help us achieve our business objectives?" or "why will this help us improve efficiency / become more compliant / avoid litigation?"
Microsoft and their partner ecosystem are masters at answering the "how" questions but there is still a significant gap in the "why" questions.
Five Things I Learned
1. Are there are companies using SharePoint as a true ECM system?
The short answer to this question is a qualified yes. Probably the best example of the use of SharePoint as a true ECM was by United Airlines. They store many thousands of documents in SharePoint and distribute these globally. Unlike some other organizations, who tend to use SharePoint with a portal focus, United was focusing on true ECM, to the point they adopted the AIIM definition of ECM as their own.
Their initial business drivers were eDiscovery and records retention and the ECM mandate was expanded to integrating Continental and United following their merger in spring of 2010. Their plan is to migrate 10 TB of data to SharePoint and apply metadata. If that isn't true ECM I'm not sure what is.
2. How are Companies Using Managed Metadata Services?
There were several sessions on one of what I believe is possibly the most important innovation in SharePoint 2010 from an ECM perspective; metadata management. Metadata was introduced in SharePoint 2007 and the functionality greatly expanded in 2010 through Managed Metadata Services, essentially a way to create a common set of terms, index attributes and content types that can be shared across the enterprise. SharePoint also allows for selective use of "folksonomy" tagging , where users can enter their own terms. This is potentially powerful from an end user perspective but left unmanaged could lead to chaos. Fortunately, there are some administrative controls in place to prevent that from happening but it is far from perfect (eg. there is a risk that you end up with every known (mis)spelling of a particular word).
There are also some important limitations to be aware of, but with appropriate planning all but the very largest implementations should be able to work within these. And on the topic of planning, this particular session had a strong focus on the importance of planning your overall enterprise taxonomy, including both folders and metadata. As I noted earlier, it shows that Microsoft is coming to understand the importance of proper planning for the complexities of ECM and is part of their evolution from using SharePoint as a "shared drive on steroids" to leveraging the transformational capabilities of the tool.
3. Technical Scalability
As I noted above Microsoft has done a lot of work to ensure that SharePoint can scale to hundreds of millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of users. To cut a long story short, SharePoint can technically scale to a very large size. Having said that, I do see a significant gap in understanding how to manage the organizational change associated with large-scale implementations. Historically, the Microsoft partner community is focused primarily on technology, not people and although that is changing somewhat as both Microsoft and their partners recognize the value and importance of governance and good planning, it is still a challenge.
4. How Well Does SharePoint Scale Globally?
I'm not talking about scale in the purely technical sense, my interest here is how well SharePoint can handle multiple offices in multiple languages. The short answer is that it can do so with a bit of help. There were several vendors offering modules to replicate and distribute SharePoint (Syntergy and AvePoint being two) and one vendor offering enhancements to SharePoint's language packs (Icefire Studios).
The fact that additional modules being required to extend an ECM platform globally is certainly not unique to SharePoint but the need for add-on modules in SharePoint is an important consideration I will discuss in my conclusions below.
5. Records Management in SharePoint
It's the ten-million dollar question; can you really do RM in SharePoint? There have been many articles on this topic and much discussion in the records community.
In brief, SharePoint 2010 has greatly enhanced the ability to manage records as compared to the functionality available in the 2007 version but there are still some shortcomings. These can be largely addressed by purchasing an add-on module. One such module is offered by GimmalSoft, who have created the first and only DoD 5015.2 compliant RM solution for SharePoint currently available.
According to GimmalSoft, base SharePoint RM addresses 80 of the 168 required elements in the DoD standard and their Compliance Suite for SharePoint meets the remaining 88 requirements. In addition to DoD certification they are working on other certifications like MoReq 2010.
Conclusion
In addition to the items noted above there are two more important considerations when evaluation whether SharePoint will meet your needs as an ECM system.
The first is mobile access. Ron Miller at Fierce Content Management has put together an excellent summary on mobile access in SharePoint. Suffice it to say Microsoft lags other established ECM vendors like OpenText in this space.
The second and larger consideration is the fact that you will very likely need to extend SharePoint by purchasing a variety of third-party applications and / or writing custom code to achieve true Enterprise Content Management. This is not a criticism of Microsoft per se, it's how they go about their business, something my friend Nick Inglis refers to as leaving "areas where partners have room to develop".
When considering a SharePoint deployment be sure to take into account both the cost and complexity of managing an environment with multiple modules from multiple vendors. Although SharePoint 2010 has significant capabilities out of the box, it is likely you will need to work with Microsoft's partner community at some point.
In the end the 2011 SharePoint conference has reinforced my belief that there are no silver bullets when it comes to ECM. SharePoint is a fantastic tool with a rich set of capabilities, but like all other ECM applications it is just a tool. The determining factors for ECM success will continue to be strong alignment with your core business objectives and strong change management within your user community. These things transcend technology and done right, will serve you well regardless of the tool you choose.