Everyone needs Microsoft Sharepoint, right? It’s all the rage…but just WHAT do you actually do with it? This is the critical first decision you must make to enjoy a successful Sharepoint implementation. Most people have a basic understanding of what it is “supposed” to do, i.e. collaboration, business intelligence, document management, workflow, etc. But where do you start? How can you quickly deploy a solution and realize the value that Sharepoint can bring to your organization? What we typically see is this: an organization has heard the buzz, wants to join the party, and has purchased MOSS with the high hopes of it immediately solving their content management struggles. Then reality strikes. Various Sharepoint sites are thrown up for different business units, document libraries are created where users can store their digital assets, duplication occurs, information sharing is compromised, workflows are created that optimized certain processes, but fail to satisfy most scenarios. Using Sharepoint actually starts to hinder productivity and users begin to wonder why it was implemented to begin with.

A successful implementation begins with the correct mindset of what Sharepoint really is. It is not a solution in itself. I like to think of Sharepoint as a platform on which you can build and integrate solutions to most of your business problems that aren’t already addressed by your Line of Business application (EPR, MRP, Finance, etc). Sharepoint has its obvious strengths, but also has some not-so-obvious weaknesses. For instance, it can greatly enhance a knowledge worker’s productivity by providing a dashboard to manage and execute most of the tasks or projects that they work on throughout the day. It provides an enterprise search tool that allows the worker to easily find the information they need to do their job, no matter where that information is stored. It can also be used to centralize all of the unstructured databases that an organization typically has: spreadsheets, access files, and word document lists. However, there are areas where Sharepoint doesn’t measure up that could cause a deployment to suffer. Document/Records management is one of these areas. Yes, Sharepoint is a fine storage location for the Microsoft Office documents that you create, but what about all the paper records that need to be stored and archived electronically? How do you plan to get them into Sharepoint? When you have scanned a majority of those unstructured documents into Sharepoint your overall system performance can suffer due to the terabyte of files stored and binary objects in the database itself. Then, what is your recourse?

Prior to Sharepoint going mainstream, the document management industry was already mature, with many great products available that do all these things and do them WELL. Sharepoint has all but ignored these major obstacles and still billed itself as a document management system. Don’t get me wrong, the more I know about Sharepoint, the more I love it. It has opened up new doors to organizational efficiency by providing a common space for people to USE the content once its been created. The main point I have today is that when it comes to document management, you don’t have to make the choice between Sharepoint and a traditional ECM system such as Laserfiche (see Agile ECM). The best solutions integrate both, using each system’s strengths along with their shared technologies to create a completely holistic, end-to-end solution. And the add-on benefit is that these integrated solutions drastically reduce deployment time because you no longer have to customize Sharepoint with code to overcome its shortcomings.

Be sure to check back next month, where I will discuss a few concrete examples of where the marriage of Sharepoint and Laserfiche clearly is a synergistic combination with virtually limitless potential.

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Brian Sabin wrote one article on this blog.

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