Is There A Business Case For Using SharePoint as an Enterprise CMS?

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jan 30, 2012

Over the past 12 months alone, there have been two reports that suggest that SharePoint is being widely adopted across the enterprise and that it is being used in many cases as an enterprise content management system. A recent paper from Microsoft makes the business case for these two trends.

SharePoint as an Enterprise CMS?

The research that suggests SharePoint is being widely adopted comes from the AIIM State of the ECM Industry report, which showed that 70% of enterprises as of last April had completed SharePoint deployments.

In a later report entitled Using SharePoint for ECM. How well is it meeting expectations? Doug Miles, also of AIIM, examined whether it was meeting enterprise CMS expectations and concluded that over half of the companies surveyed intended SharePoint to become their primary enterprise CMS system.

What neither report asked — nor answered — is whether it made business sense to use it as such, especially now as many of the individual components of enterprise CMS can be sourced in the cloud relatively cheaply.

The report from Microsoft is entitled the Business Value of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management. Needless to say, coming from Microsoft, it is going to argue that the business advantages of using it as an enterprise CMS are considerable. Nevertheless, there are still some significant points worth noting.

Citing the AIIM definition of enterprise CMS as “…the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes…”the report argues that an enterprise CMS platform must contain some, or all, of the following components:

Document Management
Records Management
Web Content Management
Rich Media Management
Archiving and Library Services
Human Centric Workflow
Business Process Management
Transactional Content Management
Scanning (Image and Capture)
Document Output Management
Customer Communications Management
E-Mail Archiving

In addition to this, it also manages both structured and unstructured content as well as retention policies that keep useful information on in situ and moves useless information out.

Most enterprises, the paper says, have identified one specific type of document, or kind of information to be held in their enterprise CMS. The rest is relegated to file shares, email accounts, or even desktops, leaving a vast resource of information outside of the system, and outside enterprise use.

Microsoft and Enterprise CMS

Microsoft says, though, that for an enterprise CMS to be properly effective it must reach all corners of the enterprise; it brings structure to all manner of information and tracks it from one set of tools.

However, many enterprise CMS deployments fail for one or more of the following reasons:

The solution is not adopted by workers and remains outside their work processes
Users don’t adopt the solution and incorporate it into their work processes.
Often targeted at specific group or department limiting use and accessibility
They can be expensive to deploy and if the ROI is not evidently clear, many enterprises will give up on them.

SharePoint Data Management

SharePoint 2010, however, is different, Microsoft says. It can manage both types of data — structured and unstructured — and overcomes deployment problems with: