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Microsoft SharePoint Offers Affordable Solutions for Collaboration and Teamwork

By Paul Yantus

When Microsoft introduced SharePoint with Windows 2003, the Enterprise Content Management industry tried to distance itself from the product. Analysts even created Basic Content Services (BCS), an entirelynew classification just for Microsoft. Their emphasis was on the word “Basic” which was probably fair, as Microsoft stated that they were providing infrastructure to enable their partners to create solutions.

At the time SharePoint was introduced, it was interesting how negatively the industry reacted to Microsoft’s entrance, and yet how positively, around the same time, they responded to the term “Enterprise.” Most forward thinking leaders in document management simply saw Microsoft providing new tools with which they could create relevant solutions and enable affordable collaboration. Microsoft’s approach certainly didn’t seem any less scalable than products viewed as “enterprise” class.

The dynamics of this market are truly fascinating. It’s an industry that grew up by first implementing document-centric solutions at the departmental level. “Enterprise Content Management” was a term originally pushed by the more successful players in an effort to distance themselves from the smaller ones. It had much less to do with how the technology was deployed. The industry is now just waking up to the fact that documents are just another form of information to be managed.

The vast majority of “Enterprise Content Management” solutions don’t extend beyond the high-end application for which they were deployed. The economics of a Microsoft SharePoint solution are enabling many newcustomers to enter the market, distributing the technology much further into the organization. These new adopters have not previously benefited from traditional ECM products. It poses the question of why they called it “enterprise” in the first place, and why the technology spreading across the enterprise is called ‘basic’ instead of “enterprise.”

Users are adopting SharePoint en masse because of the opportunities it offers for collaboration, content management, workflow and search, all of which are essential to organizational goals and processes. And all of these benefits come at a very affordable cost.

When we look at the Information Management (IM) market, we see the big players trying to provide complete end-user solutions for content management – with the exception of Microsoft. I don’t know about you, but when I think of the big IM players I think infrastructure, not end user solutions.

Today, SharePoint Server 2007 provides the end user a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with other team members, find organizational all resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow and leverage business insight to make more informed decisions.

Microsoft has already declared SharePoint their fastest-selling server ever, with more than 100 million licensed copies. SharePoint sites are everywhere. We like to refer to SharePoint sprawl at Captaris as ‘SharePoint gone wild.’ It enables collaboration, but it requires supervision. As expected with a relatively new product, Microsoft, still has some gaps in their ECM framework. Unlike the many ECM players who thrived on centralized imaging, for Microsoft imaging wasn’t a focus in early releases. Microsoft’s approach, in juxtaposition to the other IM vendors, has always been to think from the desktop out. This is the case with SharePoint where Microsoft’s emphasis on Microsoft Office documents clearly skews their thinking.

Captaris and others are adding value to the SharePoint environment by filling in some of the imaging gaps.

The industry is still struggling to adjust to customers who don’t have 20 years of experience behind them. We’re a highly fragmented industry where fax, capture, document management, and Web content management are all specialties. The emerging customer has a business problem to solve. They don’t care about these specializations, aren’t interested in new terms, and are seeking simplicity in solving their business problems. Terms like “metadata” are enough to scare away novice users.
The industry also is struggling to adjust to changing economics. It’s comfortable for customers with six-figure problems, but SharePoint is appealing to customers who would prefer not to spend five figures, much less six. Many of the leading players in the market don’t have models that work for this economic paradigm.

The reality is our industry has finally hit the big time, with the technology now being affordable by the masses. Vendors, VARs and ISVs will do well to recognize the tremendous opportunities that SharePoint offers to the uninitiated who have the same urgent needs to streamline their business processes as the “big guys;” and to focus on bringing affordable enterprise content management to the rest of the enterprise along with small-l and medium-sized businesses who are focused on extending their competitive edge.

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