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In a previous post, I made some business-centric predictions about enterprise content management (ECM), but being an IT person at heart, I couldn’t resist putting on my techie hat to make some IT-focused predictions for the new year.
In that spirit, here are my three SharePoint trends to watch for 2011:
- Competition with social computing platforms heats up
- ECM coexistence division of labor shifts away from big ECM towards SharePoint 2010
- Increased deployments of SharePoint 2010 as core ECM system
1. Competition with Social Computing Platforms Heats Up
One of the most significant changes by far to the landscape of ECM as a domain has been the emergence of social business software, which adds a new dimension to the coexistence of SharePoint with more traditional ECM systems such as IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum and Open Text (see Figure 1 — A Very Short History of SharePoint Coexistence).
Figure 1 – A Very Short History of SharePoint Coexistence
And when you look at the overlap in functionality between SharePoint 2010 and social computing platforms, the picture gets messier still.
Figure 2 – Functional Overlap Between SharePoint 2010 and Social Business Software
As Figure 2 — Functional Overlap Between SharePoint 2010 and Social Business Software shows, SharePoint bridges the gap between document collaboration and conversational collaboration within the enterprise. By so doing, it “does the job” of both traditional ECM systems and applications such as blogs, wikis and intranet portals. Until recently, you could simply make sure SharePoint and these other applications stayed out of each other’s way, and you’d be fine.
But as Figure 2 also shows, when you throw a social business software (SBS) product such as Jive or Drupal into the mix, things get more complicated.
Because SBS bridges the gap between internal and external conversational collaboration, it overlaps with SharePoint — which brings another player (and set of vendors and products) into the coexistence mix.
Add to this the fact that social computing for the enterprise is becoming much more mainstream — even conservative organizations are making inroads — and we’re going to see increasing overlap/competition between SharePoint 2010 and social computing platforms like Jive, Drupal, etc.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether more organizations will choose SharePoint 2010’s “good enough” approach or the best-of-breed approach of the niche social computing players. My gut tells me that most organizations will choose SharePoint, given how many of them already own SharePoint and how tight IT spend will be over the next 12 months: buying a new, niche platform will be a tough sell in 2011 when something you already have in house does a good enough job.
2. ECM Coexistence Division of Labor Shifts Away from Big ECM Towards SharePoint 2010
SharePoint will still be primarily used as the front-end point of access for end users to create, share, collaborate on and manage documents, while ECM systems will continue to be used to “back-end” that activity and provide more robust search, indexing and document control than SharePoint can provide. What gets lumped into “front-end” versus “back-end” is changing fast, however.
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