Developing an Information Management Strategy for SharePoint

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 8, 2011

In this, the month of everything SharePoint at CMSWire, we’ve started looking at SharePoint in some detail and with some interesting results. Last week, Jed Cawthorne, a Senior Strategy Consultant for enterprise content management, looked at uses for SharePoint. Here we will look at some of the challenges with deployments in the enterprise.

This may, at first glance, be a no-brainer, but scratch at the surface of SharePoint deployments, and problems — and hopefully solutions — start to appear.

Here again, planning is king. Last week, Jed concluded:

The key point is to treat SharePoint like any other potential solution or product, ensure you know exactly what you want to do (clear and well defined requirements) and ensure you understand what approach you want to take…”.

The next step is analyze how it might benefit your business — not an easy task if you haven’t identified why you want to use it in the first place.

However, assuming you know this, what else do you need to look at? An IDC paper recently made available by AIIM tackles this issue. Entitled Enabling SharePoint Operational Efficiency and Information Governance with EMC SourceOne, it looks at issues of operational efficiency and information governance using EMC’s SourceOne.

Obviously, the paper, written by Laura DuBois, focuses on how EMC’s SourceOne manages SharePoint sites, libraries and content sprawl. And you don’t have to be using SourceOne to see these issues as problems that are endemic in many enterprises.

SharePoint, Information Governance

Citing a study from last year by IDC in Archiving in the Context of Information Management, she says at that point around 72% of enterprises of a survey group of 508 firms were already using SharePoint at that stage.

Only 20% were holding off, and in light of the fact that the release of SharePoint 2010 had been well flagged, it is not unlikely that they were holding out for them.

The AIIM State of the ECM industry report from earlier this year also reflected those findings, and also showed that many companies were either deploying SharePoint 2010 for the first time or were looking at upgrading from 2007 to 2010.

The IDC study, DuBois says, also shows that the deployment of SharePoint is often accelerated by its accessibility, usability and affordability. As a result, SharePoint deployments often lack proper architectural planning, IT processes or corporate governance oversight.

Add into the cauldron the fact that, once the initial deployment starts spreading across the enterprise and it is incorporated into work processes and dispersed teams, scalability and performance issues surface.

Typically, then, when SharePoint use starts spreading in the organization, it is characterized by a growth in the amount of content, the number of sites and the number of users. This, in turn, poses the following challenges:

Scalability

DuBois says that, under Microsoft guidelines, one SharePoint server database should get no larger than 100GB, or five million documents. As a result, to go beyond that, additional databases are needed. While Microsoft addressed this to some extent in SharePoint 2010, it still applies to environments that have not migrated and are using older versions.