SharePoint: ECM for Everyone

Microsoft SharePoint has grown so fast and has become so ubiquitous that AIIM recently suggested it had become a common noun for content management, like Kleenex for tissue and Xerox for copying.

According to AIIM surveys, SharePoint adoption rates have exceeded 65% across a variety of regions and industries, yet Forrester Research states over half of enterprises still maintain three or more ECM repositories. If SharePoint is so popular, why haven't more enterprises adopted it as their sole platform for enterprise content?

Good question. Microsoft said SharePoint 2010 was the answer. The company touted SharePoint 2010 as the "information operating system." Is it? A growing number of analysts and customers indicate that new features in SharePoint 2013 make it more "enterprise-ready" than ever. Is it necessary or advisable to risk migrating existing, mission-critical processes from legacy enterprise systems to SharePoint?

SharePoint Comes of Age

Forrester data confirms that most large organizations are maintaining multiple ECM systems. For each system, the organization pays separate licensing and maintenance and hires separate teams of developers, administrators and support personnel to implement, operate and support them.

However, when you look at the limitations of previous SharePoint iterations or the incumbent ECM providers, it made sense. SharePoint did not offer the scalable enterprise platform or functionality needed for enterprise-wide applications. While other ECM vendors offer robust enterprise platforms, their application-specific features focus on vertical applications. They get the job done, but could not possibly be all things to all organizations. Getting the job done comes at a price, as cost per user is exceptionally high. Perhaps that's justifiable for users focused on the vendor's specialty, but it breaks down when applied to users who simply need access to basic content management and collaboration features or who need a different type of specialized application.

KnowledgeLake had anxiously waited for the day SharePoint matured to this point. We believe that day arrived with SharePoint 2010 and continues to advance with the 2013 release. Below are key features that enable SharePoint to provide enterprise level ECM. With these features, SharePoint can replace the multiple ECM repositories, and their associated costs and limitations, that plague most organizations today:

• Enterprise managed metadata;
• Business connectivity services (BCS);
• List validations;
• Large list optimization;
• FAST search;
• Remote BLOB storage (RBS);
• Audit trails;
• Document IDs and sets;
• Workflow; and
• Records nanagement.

These features enable SharePoint to be more robust, but can't truly replace other ECM systems, unless advanced content management functions, such as specialized high-volume document capture, transactional content management or business process management are added. This requires the platform-extending solutions created by third-part providers. What SharePoint provides is a platform that permits third-party providers to apply these specialized solutions in a true enterprise context.

SharePoint 2010 Features That Enable the Enterprise

Prior to SharePoint 2010, one of SharePoint's shortcomings was its rudimentary search and metadata structure. This functionality generally did not extend above the individual library/departmental level. SharePoint now breaks this barrier with enterprisewide data taxonomies that utilize metadata frameworks and enterprise content types, as well as enforcement of these frameworks into individual libraries/departments.

However, while an enterprise framework is a given for true ECM, the system must also be flexible enough to accommodate the variations of how people actually work and describe their work. For example, the accounting department may use a certain term for a field that appears in a form, but legal or human resources may refer to the same piece of data by a different name in their forms. SharePoint accommodates these variations while maintaining the top-level standards defining the unambiguous attributes of this term. Most of these features relate to an expanded, more flexible means of describing, organizing and finding content.

Is SharePoint finally an enterprise-ready ECM for the masses? We think so. For many enterprises, SharePoint, together with solutions built on the improved SharePoint platform, can now replace multiple repositories with a single solution. Until now, you have co-existed with SharePoint. Now you can embrace it. 

Our Focus: Enterprise Content Management

KnowledgeLake products enable organizations of any size to standardize on SharePoint as a powerful content platform for building and deploying rich metadata-driven solutions that satisfy many diverse business workloads, such as document imaging, workflow, BPM, transactional content management, document management, records management, collaboration, portals and more. Long-term content viability, open standards, information worker productivity and compliance are the key drivers of product design.

KnowledgeLake has products that enable both the SharePoint client and the SharePoint server for capturing and managing content. On the client side, KnowledgeLake offers two products: KnowledgeLake Capture and KnowledgeLake Connect. Capture is focused on batch scanning and indexing paper documents using many different forms of automation, such as barcodes, patch codes, and zonal OCR for easing the burden of applying document metadata. KnowledgeLake Connect is more document-centric and can capture both scanned images and electronic content, such as Microsoft Office documents. KnowledgeLake Connect allows the user to easily save content to SharePoint from most desktop applications. KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint is a set of server-based components that extend the SharePoint platform by adding enterprise capable document imaging functionality. It enables SharePoint users to organize, store, access and route millions of scanned documents and data across the enterprise.