Enabling Enterprise Content Management with Confidence
In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft also made many enhancements in the areas of information management, e-discovery, rights management, as well as secure delegation to help organizations strike the delicate balance between compliance and collaboration.
While Microsoft has made many enhancements to the SharePoint platform to improve productivity, there are still challenges that remain to transform the way line of business users, IT, and compliance stakeholders can work together to truly enable enterprise collaboration with confidence.
Unleashing SharePoint for ECM
Utilizing SharePoint 2013 for ECM demands proper planning. There are five key stages in ECM that will enable line of business users, IT and compliance stakeholders to collaborate with confidence: capture, storage and access, delivery, preservation and management. Let's discuss these in further detail, outlining the key objectives for each.
In the first stage, capture, organizations centralize their company-wide assets into one digital repository, the only place knowledge workers can create, present and manage all content regardless of where it originally resided. This entails digitizing any paper media or files, and uploading them into the ECM system efficiently. Then, the digitized media must be tagged with appropriate metadata for indexing and enterprise search. Content from other digital legacy data stores—-whether Lotus Notes, EMC Documentum or even local file shares—must be migrated into SharePoint (or even the cloud via Microsoft Office 365—SharePoint Online, for that matter) while still maintaining all associated metadata to consolidate enterprise content and reduce legacy licensing costs. One final consideration is whether or not organizations want to eliminate some legacy file shares. Any ECM system should have the ability to connect with this legacy content and stream it through SharePoint, opening it up to its management and presentation features without the need for direct import into the platform's Microsoft SQL Server content databases.
The next stage, storage and access, delves into efficiently managing native SQL Server content database storage to unify enterprise content residing on disparate legacy systems. The vast majority of content uploaded by users is unstructured data—audio files, video files, PDFs, pictures, Word documents—which then turn into binary large objects (BLOBs) in SQL, potentially degrading platform performance. Organizations must manage the growing amount of this unstructured data in order to maximize their potential for scalability and performance, while efficiently archiving content in a manner ensuring all compliance objectives are met. Because many organizations now have presences worldwide, global users must have real-time access to all up-to-date content, as well as unified accessibility rights management of all end-users.
Delivery ensures all the proper stakeholders have access to the right content at the right time. Organizations must ensure they have a unified presentation platform for all legacy enterprise content—regardless of source and type—subject to enterprise-content search. Content and customizations must be propagated automatically from staging/testing through to production, so as to limit human error and promote a culture of governance. The ECM system must also have timely delivery of comprehensive reporting for management and compliance purposes.
End users must then have the confidence that all content and data in an ECM system, and the ECM system itself, is fully protected against accidental deletion or corruption. This is where the next ECM stage, preservation, comes in. All enterprise content must be protected in a manner conserving storage resources while enabling fast, full-fidelity restoration of all prior metadata and security settings. The ECM platform itself must also be fully protected—including system configurations, customizations and workflows—through customizable system backups. Organizations must also ensure a seamless transition to warm standby system should the main production system fail as well as swift platform restoration following a disaster event.
The final stage, management, demands organizations design an ECM topology aligned with their specific processes and unit structure. 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.
Every enterprise faces the same challenge balancing the need for information transparency and collaboration with data security and governance. Successful ECM systems foster transparency and collaboration, and because of its singular capacity to connect an organization's knowledge workers, streamline business processes and manage and store information, many are looking to Microsoft SharePoint to act as an enabler to collaborate worldwide with confidence.
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.
As SharePoint continues to evolve into the very fabric of information worker workloads and an integral part of Microsoft's unified communication technology stack, it is essential to deploy an integrated end-to-end solution that will achieve the vision of efficiency and collaboration without compromising on security and compliance. In this way, organizations can stitch together a seamless solution across heterogeneous environments into a cohesive knowledge management and enterprise collaboration strategy—one that ultimately lowers the cost of today's operations while significantly improving business connectivity, innovation velocity and competitiveness.