Forrester: Where SharePoint Lacks as Enterprise CMS, Supplement and Integrate

By David Roe (@druadh20) Feb 23, 2012

With SharePoint firmly established in the enterprise, and companies looking to deploy an enterprise content management system across the company, many businesses are being forced to answer the question as to whether they should replace their enterprise CMS with SharePoint, or integrate the two.

If SharePoint hadn’t been so widely adopted across the enterprise, this might not have been an issue, but according to other recent Forrester research, some 63% of an enterprise survey group said they were using SharePoint as an enterprise CMS, a figure that is substantiated by studies from others organizations such as Gartner.

To complicate matters, according to the Forrester report Putting Together the SharePoint ECM Puzzle by Alan Weintraub, many enterprise CMS products supplement SharePoint in different ways and there are many products on the market that make enterprise CMS-SharePoint integration easier.

The key, Weintraub says, like many other IT problems, is working out what you want your enterprise CMS to do, what SharePoint functionality covers those needs, where gaps exist in those needs and what vendors best fill in those gaps.

SharePoint in the Enterprise

Needless to say, if SharePoint 2010 users hadn’t been so happy with its functionality and performance, it wouldn’t have been as successful as it has. In a July report by Forrester entitled SharePoint Adoption: Content and Collaboration Is Just the Start? 68% of IT decision makers said they were satisfied with SharePoint’s content management abilities.

However, Weintraub says, it is a disruptive force in enterprise CMS strategies. There are three reasons for this:

Packaging and Pricing: Microsoft includes SharePoint in enterprise agreements, which forces enterprises to question the commercial value of having both enterprise CMS and SharePoint and paying maintenance for both.
Business Adoption: Because of the relative ease in creating basic sites and content sharing abilities — the main business reason for investing in enterprise CMS in the first place — SharePoint adoption by business users has been quick. Collaboration, sites and intranet are consistently the highest-rated feature by business users.
SharePoint 2010 Enterprise CMS Functionality: SharePoint 2010 offered major improvements and was identified as a "Leader" in the 2011 Forrester Wave evaluation of enterprise CMS vendors as a result. Improvements included taxonomy management, enterprise deployment and retention policy management. This effectively made it a credible alternative to traditional enterprise CMS vendors.

SharePoint, Enterprise CMS Overlaps

The issue of SharePoint and enterprise CMS overlaps is a fundamental one that needs to be addressed in enterprises that have both SharePoint and enterprise CMS deployments.

Many enterprises already have enterprise content management deployments in place for specific business processes that include specific workflow and tailored interfaces.

SharePoint 2010 also comes with functionality that covers many of these components. By mapping enterprise CMS requirements with SharePoint capabilities, enterprises will be able to determine where SharePoint should fit into their enterprise CMS architecture, as well as offering an idea as to how suitable SharePoint will be for enterprise CMS needs.