How far can you go
with SharePoint for
Enterprise Content
Management?
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the capability of SharePoint to address the requirements of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). To do this we will identify both the strengths of the SharePoint feature set and the shortcomings of the out of the box product. Where shortcomings are identified, we will highlight options for extending the SharePoint product in any functional areas that are considered to be lacking in depth.
Over the past two years Kainos as an organisation has seen a dramatic rise in the number of customers seeking to implement SharePoint as the mainstay of their document management and intranet solutions. Right across the industry the uptake of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 has been massive. Microsoft has been exceedingly successful in their sales campaign, but the deployment statistics for SharePoint do not equal the sales figures. So why is this the case? What discourages organisations from actually deploying SharePoint and what should organisations consider before broaching implementation?
At first glance, SharePoint seems to fit the bill when it comes to delivering Enterprise Content Management capability and appears to address all areas of ECM. But in which areas does it excel? Can this product really be all things to all men?
What is ECM?
AIIM, the Information Management Best Practice Body, defines Enterprise Content Management as, “the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes.”
And it is using these terms (capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver) against which we wish to evaluate the SharePoint offering for ECM. And in doing so, determine the capability of the SharePoint to meet the objectives of ECM as defined by AIIM.
What is SharePoint trying to achieve?
SharePoint is marketed essentially as a platform solution, not an application. Used correctly, it has the potential to become the backbone of an organisation’s information architecture.
In September 2008, Microsoft was named by Gartner as a leader in the ECM market, moving away for
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
This shift reflected the massive in-roads made by the MOSS 2007 products into the ECM market. SharePoint also ranked as one of top two products for implementing Intranet portals in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals.
According to the Gartner report, Microsoft is one of only 4 or 5 tier one vendors that offers all the core functional components of ECM (namely Document Management, Document Imaging, Records Management, Workflow, Web Content Management and Document-Centric Collaboration), and has the ability to support ECM in global and enterprise wide deployments.
With MOSS 2007, Microsoft has merged a number of information management technologies into one central platform. This enables organisations to leverage a common infrastructure to provide all aspects of their intranet, extranet and internet systems, delivering key collaborative, analytical and searching capabilities within these systems.
The inclusion of such a broad spectrum of features means that in some areas, SharePoint may not be as functionally rich as some of the pure-play products in areas such as Web Content Management or Records Management. However, in the following sections we will take a closer look at how SharePoint addresses each of the five objectives of ECM as defined by AIIM.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Capture Content
The content capture capabilities of SharePoint 2007 are at their best when coupled with the Office 2007 client applications. While Office 2003 applications will still facilitate the creation and editing of documents from within the SharePoint libraries, the 2007 products offer the use of additional features such as a built in panel for document metadata capture, the ability to embed metadata properties in the body of document templates, labelling and barcoding of documents and the ability to compare two versions of a SharePoint document side by side.
Alongside the creation and upload of unstructured documents and files, SharePoint also provides for the capture of structured user data in the form of list and form library items. Data is entered in these lists through either manual entry in aspx forms, importing information from excel files or through data capture using Infopath forms.
The Enterprise edition of MOSS 2007 encapsulates the Infopath Forms Services feature which allows relatively complex forms with embedded calculations and validation to be published to a form library or as a content type in a site collection. These forms can then be completed by users via the browser, with data being drawn from the form fields into the metadata columns in the host library.
All metadata to be captured via the lists and libraries columns, whether relating to structured or unstructured data can be configured centrally within the site collection columns and can be enforced by the system as mandatory user information when creating or uploading content. This means that the content capture becomes an inherent part of the site content classification, aiding user navigation and information findability within the site structures.
One element of the SharePoint feature set relating to information capture that may be seen as a weakness is the document imaging capability. While SharePoint permits the upload and classification of a variety of file types, including TIFF and PDF, it does not provide its own engine for capturing scanned content directly from the scanning device.
This gap however has been quickly filled by a number of 3rd party solution and scanning providers such as Kofax, eCopy and KnowledgeLake via the provision of connector utilities for capturing, classifying and uploading the scanned content into the appropriate library location in SharePoint.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Manage Content
The document management and collaboration features in the SharePoint environment are some of the strongest assets of the product. These features allow document check out and check in, major and minor version control, viewing and restoration of previous document versions and auditing of actions performed on documents.
The MySites capability provides users with the option to create a personal workspace within the SharePoint hierarchy in which they may add documents, blog, view email and manage their own set of links to and feeds from areas of interest within other SharePoint sites or external internet sites. These personal workspaces also provide users with a means to connect with other users throughout the organisation through the use of membership lists and colleague tracker web parts, allowing them to keep abreast of what other users are involved in within the SharePoint network. This functionality allows organisations to avail of the ever popular social networking aspects of SharePoint, but within a secure intranet environment when use can be monitored and controlled.
The introduction of Microsoft Content Management Server into the MOSS 2007 product has
introduced a Web Content Management capability which was not present in previous generations of the SharePoint product.
While the content management interface may not be as feature rich as the pure-play WCM products in areas such as automatic styling and accessibility checking, SharePoint provides a solid means of producing custom content types and page layouts through SharePoint Designer. Through this users can create web content based on a set of centralised page layouts, maintaining a consistent look and feel throughout the site. Approval workflow mechanisms employed within the document collaboration functionality may also be used in the page libraries to enable approval mechanisms for the created pages before they are published to the site.
As well as the approval workflow for document and content management, MOSS 2007 also provides a number of other out of the box workflow templates for use within the content types and document libraries. These workflows are aimed at:
• Feedback collection
• Signature collection
• Disposition approval
There is also a translation management workflow approval available on content libraries when using site variations to deliver multi-lingual sites. It should be noted that the Collect Signature workflow is available only in conjunction with Office 2007.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Manage Content (continued)
Whilst the out of the box workflows are a good starting point for an organisation to begin introducing electronic processes for document and content management, it is likely that they will not fulfil all the business processes required by an organisation as part of their SharePoint implementation.
To this end, there are 3 main options available for implementing custom workflow processes in a SharePoint environment:
• SharePoint Designer: provides a graphical user interface for building relatively simple workflows which can be deployed to individual lists and libraries within SharePoint
• Custom .NET workflows using either asp.net or Infopath forms: provide for a higher level of complexity within the workflow processes and allow for deployment across all sites in an implementation
• 3rd party workflow products which integrate with SharePoint such as K2 BlackPearl and BlackPoint: provide for a high level of complexity but within a graphical user interface The most appropriate option for an organisation regarding the deployment of custom workflow will depend on the size of the SharePoint implementation, the skill set of the users creating the workflows and a comparison of the development effort versus the license cost of a 3rd party product.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Store Content
SharePoint is built on SQL Server technology with all site structure, content and search indexes stored in a series of SQL Server databases. This type of storage allows for a number of backup and restore options, via either builtin SharePoint utilities, SQL Server backup and restore operations or 3rd party backup agents. The options used for backup and restoration of content within an
organisation’s SharePoint environment will depend on a number of factors such as the database size, the flexibility required in the backup schedule and the options required around transactional backups and the compression of files.
While the storage of everything within databases provides a relatively simple backup and restore strategy, it may also pose some challenges for organisations in terms of training dedicated DBA resources to manage and maintain the health of the databases. It also requires a level of planning around the setting of quotas on the size of sites and the allocation of sites to databases so that the individual database size does not increase to a level which becomes impractical to backup and restore within a reasonable timeframe.
The out of the box SharePoint platform also does not make provision for the use of secondary storage which means that the cost of storage may become quite high unless a 3rd party utility is used to archive older content to separate secondary storage.
Within the logical architecture of SharePoint, sites, content types, lists and libraries become the main containers for storing and structuring documents and content within the SharePoint implementation. The flexibility of how these containers can be structured allows for organisations to model their functional taxonomies relatively easily, allowing users to have a logical navigation path through the information.
The ability to store metadata as a means of classification against the uploaded content also aids the navigation and search options available within the SharePoint site hierarchies.
Many organisations have begun to use SharePoint as a means of replacing traditional network file shares. This certainly brings many benefits over the file share method of storage, such as the ability to classify files as they are uploaded and in the increased search capabilities within the SharePoint environment.
The use of SharePoint also promotes information sharing amongst users and seeks to discourage information from being ‘hidden’ in several layers of nested folders. The inheritance model of user permissions within SharePoint also allows administrators to better control who has access to the information within the site, thus reducing the maintenance overhead of file share access rights.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Store Content (continued)
It should be considered however when replacing file shares with SharePoint that not all file types are appropriate to be stored within the SharePoint databases. Some examples of inappropriate files include executables, Dynamic Link Libraries, Microsoft Access files and batch files. It should also be taken into consideration how the information within the SharePoint sites is to be used and if it is appropriate to perform a mass migration of all files from their existing locations into the SharePoint hierarchy.
For example, if documents are current and need to be collaborated on and reviewed by a number of users within the organisation then SharePoint is the ideal storage location. However, if there are old files that are no longer accessed regularly or if they are not required to be held in a collaborative environment, there may be a case for these files to remain as read only in their existing location on a shared drive or to be archived to secondary storage. The enterprise search capability could then be used to index these files and allow them to be returned in users queries, without the storage overhead of maintaining them in the SharePoint databases.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Preserve Content
When we talk about preserving information within SharePoint, we are mainly referring to the preservation of the integrity of the content and documents within the SharePoint sites. To this end, SharePoint provides a number of features to assist in this preservation.
The Records Management capability in SharePoint is delivered in the form of the Records Centre site template which provides the ability to create a separate area to which users can send snapshots of documents and their metadata for safe keeping. Because this records area is maintained in a separate site, this allows for stricter user permissions to be applied to this area thus maintaining the integrity of the files within.
Documents sent to the records centre site are routed automatically by SharePoint to an appropriate library within the site, based on the content type assigned to the document in its original site location. This removes the need for a dedicated Records Manager to continually monitor where records are being filed after the routing mechanism has been configured. However this may remove some of the file plan flexibility offered by other Records Management systems.
Additional features within the records centre allow for expiration policies to be applied to the documents so that they will not be retained for longer than they are legally required. It is possible however, to configure holds on certain documents if they are being used in legal proceedings so that they will not be affected by any expiry policies for the duration of the hold.
Security settings in SharePoint are the central means to maintaining document and content integrity within the SharePoint site hierarchies. Assigning appropriate permissions to users and groups of users within the sites and libraries results in users only having the ability to access and edit information which is relevant to them.
The security trimming features of SharePoint also provides the mechanism for removing visibility of any items to which a user has not been granted access, so that sensitive information is not seen by inappropriate users when navigating or searching the sites.
In order for information to be preserved effectively in SharePoint, it is vital that an organisation devises a governance policy to define the roles that users will play within the SharePoint
implementation, the privileges that they will have within the sites and the procedures that will be followed when creating new site structures within the implementation. A solid governance plan will also help determine how information will be managed within the sites and how users will navigate and access that information.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Preserve Content (continued)
One area relating to preserving information in which SharePoint may be deemed as falling short is in the area of compliance Records Management standards. Use of the DoD compliance pack released last year allows organisations to implement a records management solution that adheres to the Dod1015.2 standard. However there are no packs available yet which provide compliance with the European standards for Records Management.
If compliance with European RM standards is a major requirement for your organisation, but you still wish to use SharePoint as the central portal for information within the organisation, it may be necessary to couple SharePoint with a pure play Records Management product in order to meet this need.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint’s Ability to Deliver Content
A major portion of SharePoint’s feature set is dedicated to delivering content to the end user. SharePoint provides the ability to create sites and portals aimed at intranet, extranet and internet audiences through the use of web application zones. This allows a single portal to be delivered to a variety of audiences, each with varying levels of access and content visibility. Information security in this scenario can still be maintained using forms based authentication for users outside the organisation.
Information targeting to users (depending on - audience, security group or distribution group membership) facilitates the delivery of content in a manner relevant to each user. All web parts and user controls on the pages within a site may be targeted to a specific audience so that the user’s first impression of the portal is that it is tailored to their needs.
Business intelligence web parts and dashboards provide a mechanism for filtering and displaying business reports and Key Performance Indicators in a non graphical format, allowing users to gain a summarised view of their key business data in one central location.
The enterprise wide searching capabilities of SharePoint also aid in bringing all business data into view in one central portal. Business data Catalog connections to backend line of business applications, federated searches and the ability to index content both inside and outside the
SharePoint site hierarchy mean that SharePoint can easily become the central hub for all information delivery within the enterprise.
In terms of content delivery, one perceived shortfall of SharePoint is its failure to comply with the WCAG guidelines for accessibility. There are, however a number of options available for building custom web parts and page layouts to meet the accessibility guidelines set out by WCAG. It should also be noted that Microsoft is seeking to overcome this failing by making the next version of SharePoint AA compliant.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
How to Use SharePoint to the best of its ability
We’ve seen from the previous sections that SharePoint successfully delivers a variety of ECM functionality, but in order to implement SharePoint successfully within an organisation, there are a number of key points that should be considered prior to commencing a SharePoint implementation project.
• Know what problem you are trying to solve and outline your objectives. Implementing SharePoint will only be successful if it is being deployed to meet a particular need. Clear objectives should be set well ahead of the start of implementation, and the platform should then be tailored to meet those objectives.
• Plan ahead by deploying SharePoint in a manner that can be easily extended in the future as the solution grows. This planning should extend to the hardware infrastructure being
employed, the backup and restore procedures both for now and when the information volume grows, and the logical infrastructure of sites being implemented.
• Play on SharePoint’s strengths and make the most of the out of the box features. It will be more effective to implement a solution using out of the box functionality that meets 80% of your business requirement than spending a lot of time and effort focusing on building custom features to deliver the other 20%.
• It is vital to engage key end users in your plans for how SharePoint will be implemented. It will be those end users that become your advocates for the system as it is rolled out company wide. Your end users will be the ones actually using the system so if you can make their lives easier, they will be willing to promote its use.
• Identify an area of functionality that can be implemented quickly and can demonstrate to management that SharePoint can meet a particular need. Being able to demonstrate a solution or prototype first hand will gain buy-in much more effectively than a proposal on paper.
• As talked about previously, creating a governance strategy is vital to a successful implementation. Decide during planning what roles your users will play, how the
information will be structured and used, processes for implementing changes and who will
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
SharePoint Extensibility
As already mentioned, there are some limitations with the out of the box SharePoint functionality particularly around document imaging, web content management features, records management compliance and accessibility. And while a broad range of functionality is provided, the platform may not provide some of the more specialised features as the pure play products in the WCM, Records Management or scanning arenas. There are however options available if your solution requires particular functionality that is not available out of the box.
One of the major benefits of the SharePoint platform is its extensibility via the .NET framework on which the application is built. The dedicated SharePoint API allows developers to readily create custom web parts, event handlers, timer jobs and workflows which interact with the built -in SharePoint components to provide solutions to meet the business requirements of an organisation. The availability of the SharePoint API has also led to a large number of partners and product vendors developing custom components and add-ins for SharePoint both to provide additional functionality within the SharePoint interface and to provide integration points with their existing pure play applications.
In providing these 3rd party connectors, the likes of Autonomy Records Management, Kofax, OpenText and IBM, rather than discouraging the use of SharePoint and treating it as a rival platform; recognise the popularity of SharePoint as a central portal within organisations and aim to capitalise on that popularity by providing extended depth of features and filling some of the gaps in the platform.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
Conclusion
SharePoint, as we have discussed does a good job of addressing the core requirements of ECM. However it is also obvious that it does not provide all of the depth of functionality of the pure play providers in areas such as Web Content Management and Records Management.
This shortcoming however, should not discourage an organisation from deploying SharePoint for functions in which SharePoint can easily meet the organisation requirements. Where features are required that are not available out of the box, care should be taken to choose the appropriate method of extending SharePoint, whether through custom development or by coupling with a pure play product.
With the correct planning, governance and customisation we feel that SharePoint is a viable option for ECM and should not be discounted too readily when determining the ECM strategy for your organisation.
How far can you go with SharePoint
for Enterprise Content Management?
About Kainos
The name Kainos comes from ancient Greek and means new or innovative. The company is based in Northern Ireland and was established in 1986 as a joint venture between Fujitsu and The Queen’s University of Belfast business incubation unit – QUBIS. Currently privately held, it provides consulting services in the areas of IT strategy, business-case development, technology sourcing, and implementation for the Public Sector and Financial Services. It specialises in Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRMS), and originally developed the Meridio EDRM solution that was sold by a subsidiary and which has latterly been acquired by Autonomy Corporation to become the Autonomy Records Management product.
The company has 260 consultants working from four locations: Belfast, Dublin, London, and Gdansk, Poland. It has a strategic focus on UK local government and the NHS. Key customers include the Audit Commission, Havant Borough Council, Harlow Council, South Lanarkshire Council, West Lothian Council, Great Western Hospital, Ipswich NHS, and several organisations within NI Health.
Kainos is a Microsoft Gold certified partner and other major partners include IBM, Autonomy, and Genesys. The company has also won many industry awards at both corporate and customer level.
Published 2010 © Kainos Software Ltd.
All rights reserved. This publication, or any part of it, may not be reproduced or adapted, by any method whatsoever, without prior written Kainos Software Limited consent.”
