Delivering True Enterprise Content Management with SharePoint
The final stage, management, demands that organizations design an ECM topology aligned with their specific processes and unit structures. Systematic metadata-tagging administration facilitates search and navigation of enterprise content. For information consistency, ECM systems should also have efficient document versioning and check-in/check-out management. There are many levels within organizations, each with disparate rights and access privileges, and the ECM platform should be able to ensure each end-user has access/modification rights for only those elements they are authorized to view. With the BCS capabilities in SharePoint 2010, ensuring the management of collaboration and workflow tools for controlled simultaneous information processing—including management of information from integrated business applications—is also important.
The Answer: ECM
With the ever-growing volume of records and documents to tame, myriad business processes to automate, constantly evolving compliance regulations to meet and an onus to constantly author and publish fresh content, today's business environment demands a robust ECM solution to connect these disparate business needs.
Successful ECM systems foster transparency and collaboration, and because of its singular capacity to connect an organization's knowledge workers, streamline its business processes and manage and store its information, SharePoint 2010 is the platform upon which ECM systems of the future should be built.
There is no de facto way to fully utilize ECM systems, nor is there a silver bullet for crafting a perfect ECM initiative. Regardless of the ECM project's end-goal, organizations must ensure it captures, stores, preserves, manages and delivers enterprise content to its end-users efficiently.
SharePoint offers some native capabilities in this realm, but optimization opportunities remain. Refer to the sidebar, "Enhancing ECM with DocAve," to find out how to ensure that SharePoint is the unified, integrated platform it has to be for managing all five vital ECM functions.
Enhancing SharePoint ECM with DocAve
SharePoint, when fortified with DocAve, delivers an integrated platform able to satisfy the five vital ECM functions:
Capture—Deliver and present legacy data through SharePoint without the need for import, or migrate legacy data sources into SharePoint with full-fidelity, according to specific business requirements.
Store and access—Utilize Microsoft's EBS and RBS BLOB APIs offload all discrete enterprise content to tiered storage, perform enterprise-wide archiving operations with a unified business-rule engine and replicate all content and securities to regional SharePoint farms on-demand or according to customizable schedules.
Deliver—Automate application lifecycle management, expose all networked file shares and legacy database content through SharePoint and synchronize SharePoint content among multiple farms to ensure delivery of updated content to all end-users.
Preserve—Ensure quick, full-fidelity backup and restore of all ECM components directly to the production environment, establish a warm stand-by ECM system environment for disaster recovery, architect an automated content lifecycle management regime and satisfy all regulatory compliance obligations with full auditing of all ECM and user activities.
Manage—Nimbly transfer and replicate ECM content on-demand or according to customizable schedules, automatically propagate farm server customizations and solutions, monitor ECM system performance and activity from a single dashboard, and meet reporting and e-discovery obligations to identify, quarantine or hold content for further review.
To learn more about enterprise content management, and how AvePoint can help you unleash SharePoint's full ECM potential, please visit www.avepoint.com.