What’s Your View on SharePoint?

June 26, 2008 in Hot Technology by Snowbound Software

How has SharePoint changed your ECM strategy? Will you leverage SharePoint for collaborating and processing documents?

7 Comments

June 27, 2008 at 11:10 am | John Edmonds

I’m wondering if SharePoint really will work (well) with existing ECM systems – particularly because it primarily supports MS Office documents (and is not as strong with file formats like TIFF as an example).
June 27, 2008 at 12:17 pm | Brian C

SharePoint does a few things very well, and a few not so good.

++ Allows non-technical users to create and customize sites easily
+ Great integration with MS Office products

- Data storage for default components (for example lists) are not stored in a way that can be easily accessed outside of Sharepoint
- Can be expensive to roll out in a large organization.
June 27, 2008 at 1:01 pm | Trent M

I’m still unsure where it fits in the ECM picture. At first I thought it was a competitive product to systems like Documentum and FileNet. The more I learned about it, my opinion changed and I no longer think is true. Next I started thinking it would be a way to access content found in multiple ECM systems. But that doesn’t seem to be the case either. I’m still searching for how it really fits in an ECM strategy.

“Has it changed my view on our ECM strategy?” I’m not sure “changed” is the word I would use. It has “confused” my view.
June 27, 2008 at 4:15 pm | Fred Wagner

After checking it out, we’ve decided we rather keep our web content and document storage and retrieval under ‘adult supervision’. Sharepoint seems to be a webified version of Access, and we have enough grief with Access applications that our customers ‘whip up’ and then want us to convert to SQL or FileNet. If your user community are technically knowledgable, then it might be worth trying. For a large organization, with a limited technical staff (one Web admin, one FileNet admin, two Notes Admins) supporting thousands of users, Sharepoint is a non-starter.
June 30, 2008 at 3:43 pm | crshdavs

IMHO, this is a decent choice for larger orgs with lots of standard MS Office users, but my sense is that the more complex your ECM system needs (I work for an ad agency) the more difficult it is going to be.
July 10, 2008 at 8:17 am | Anton

In our (big) organisation it has been nicknamed “SorePoint” due to all the controversy it has caused. Many people here see it as a serious contender for Documentum – such a replacement is a major change to be managed. I think SP has a very valid place if collaboration and “portal-like” functionality is the focus, but I don’t expect it to get to an ECM level with us.
July 27, 2008 at 9:09 pm | Lou M

How do I delete one of the attachments? I have one to forward and it has an attachment which doesn’t belong there.