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SharePoint in Leaders Magic Quadrant for Enterprise CMS

Users love SharePoint. Users hate SharePoint. Despite much controversy around MOSS, Microsoft has been positioned by Gartner in the 2008 Leaders Magic Quadrant in both the Enterprise Content Management and Horizontal Portals segments.

Microsoft is proud of its positioning in the ECM Magic Quadrant and says this development “signifies the strides SharePoint Server 2007 is making in the ECM industry.”

MOSS as Enterprise CMS was released less than two years ago, impacting the entire ECM industry.

About Enterprise Content Management Magic Quadrant

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of the Enterprise CMS marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how selected ECM vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.

In 2008, the Enterprise CMS market is marked by consolidation, a shift toward infrastructure vendors and a focus on solutions.

Gartner evaluates ECM vendors based on their ability to deliver, vision, overall viability and sales execution/pricing, among other criteria.

2008 ECM Market Overview

According to Gartner’s statistics, worldwide ECM software license and maintenance revenue represented a US$ 2.9 billion market in 2007. Gartner predicts that total software revenue in the ECM market will grow at a compound annual rate of 12.2% through 2012.

Gartner highlights the primary trends that IT architects and planners must consider:

• ECM is increasingly becoming part of IT infrastructure
• Compliance and information retention are getting higher profiles at CxO-level
• Web 2.0 and mobile technologies are influencing richer user interfaces
• Integration and federation of content repositories will be critical
• Application specificity ranges from BCS and horizontal solutions to content-enabled vertical applications (CEVAs)
• Alternative delivery models — SaaS and open source — are gaining increased popularity

SharePoint Magic

Source: Gartner (September 2008)

SharePoint’s Strengths

Gartner notes that, more so than any other vendor, Microsoft has driven ECM market transformation with SharePoint 2007, along with other positive thoughts:

• Microsoft has brought BCS to the masses by bringing the cost per seat down and tying simple content management to the familiar desktop tools
• By commoditizing core library services, it has forced traditional ECM vendors to move deeper into vertical applications
• With MOSS 2007, Microsoft provides an integrated product suite with the six core ECM functional components, along with portal and search capabilities
• Microsoft has gained fast adoption by exploiting the synergies of integration with Office personal productivity applications, Exchange, Windows Vista and SQL Server

SharePoint’s Weaknesses

As usual, Gartner also utters a few words of caution:

• MOSS 2007 still has to mature in these areas: BPM, imaging, records management, WCM, etc.
• Large, decentralized deployments of MOSS 2007 indicate a need for improvements in scalability and in management and replication functionality
• Microsoft must continue to ramp up support, training and partner certification, as there is a clear gap between demand and supply

According to Gartner, 50% of the enterprises they surveyed use MOSS 2007 or WSS. In addition, according to Forrester’s Enterprise and SMB Software Survey, Q3 2007, nearly 65% of organizations in North American and Europe will invest in team collaboration software in 2008. The survey also found that approximately 23% of organizations plan on investing in Microsoft for their ECM solution in 2008.

Microsoft continues to evolve in the ECM space. Most recently, it joined forces with EMC and IBM to collaborate on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) spec.