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Hey. It’s me.

It’s been a while since we talked but ever since you became a Microsoft partner and started implementing SharePoint we’ve kinda drifted apart. I know you’ve been delivering SharePoint “solutions” for a long time now and you’re even Microsoft Gold Certified. That’s great for you and you should be really proud.

You’re great at the infrastructure stuff; I’ve seen you do things with SQL Server that I honestly didn’t think were possible. Same thing with Exchange and the SharePoint application itself. You can make those servers fly.

You can do user experience design and make SharePoint pages look beautiful. There are countless sites you and your pals have built that don’t look anything like SharePoint. They’re flashy, they’ve got video, they’re social and mobile. It’s a wonder to behold. 

But there’s something that’s really been bothering me lately. The more I work with you the less I think you know about ECM (which stands for Enterprise Content Management, in case you hadn’t heard that term before). This is the part of SharePoint that allows you to do things like send links to documents instead of creating copies in multiple locations. Ever heard of “records management”? Yeah, it does that too (although we may need some third party software to really make it sing). You can even use the term store to create common metadata that’s applied across the whole system. I’m not talking about letting departments create their own list-level metadata, I mean a single, standard list that’s applied enterprise-wide and everyone is expected to use it.

What’s that? None of your SharePoint friends do it that way? I know it may be a bit uncomfortable but you’ve got to understand that I’ve changed. I’m no longer some small-time department, I’m all grown up and want to do things the same way across the entire enterprise. You keep telling me SharePoint is an enterprise application but you never seem to make it work like one. This has to change.

This is hard to say so I’m just going to say it – I think we need to see other people.

I need someone who understands my requirements, someone who can satisfy my desire for a single source of the truth rather than leaving copies of documents lying all over the repository. It’s unhealthy; what if our regulator comes in here and sees this mess? Forget about the time wasted actually finding an authoritative version of a document or the mistakes we make relying on outdated copies. Sometimes I think it would just be easier to go back to the shared drive. It would certainly cost less.

I need a partner who’s passionate about metadata and is intimately familiar with a records retention scheme. What I’m really saying is I have needs that you are just not satisfying.

I like and respect you so please don’t take this the wrong way. In fact, I still need you. Those servers won’t configure themselves and we still need to design a great SharePoint user interface. We might even develop some custom applications, although let’s not go crazy and create something we’ll regret in the morning.

I need to be with someone who can help me understand the softer side of SharePoint and let everyone in my company access the information they need to carry out the work of our organization. I’ll start by looking for someone who’s an expert at building taxonomies and understands the core principles of ECM. They’ll work with us not just to build a taxonomy but also work with our business users to adapt their business processes to work well with this great technology and ensure there’s an information governance plan that will keep things fresh and up to date. Of course they'll need to know SharePoint as well but that's where we really need your help. Flexibility is the key to any relationship, and so long as we all understand the rules we should be fine.

Maybe it’s an impossible dream but there’s just so much we can do if we really commit to making this work. Can't we just be friends? I’ll try to change some things to work the way you need me to, and if you can slow down just a little to accommodate good metadata and records management I think we can make a go of this. 

Thanks for reading this far. I’m glad we can continue our relationship and hope we get stronger from here.

Love always,

Greg.