Assessing the Downside of Success

SharePoint is one of the fastest selling Microsoft products of all time.¹ It's been around for less than a decade and the 2010 release was only the fourth. So, by any measure, Microsoft SharePoint's success has been off the charts. According to AIIM, two-thirds of its membership use SharePoint.² Nor is it only analysts and industry groups that confirm SharePoint's rapid acceptance. SharePoint solutions specialist Lightning Tools surveyed 837 companies about their use of SharePoint. Seventy-five percent used SharePoint and, of those, 91% planned to increase usage in 2011.³

SharePoint's viral spread throughout organizations is not hard to understand. It's easy to deploy and use, nicely supports ad-hoc collaboration, and is well integrated with Microsoft Office. In addition, the bundling of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office makes SharePoint seem to be a low-cost, entry-level solution. But as AIIM goes on to point out in its 2010 Industry Watch study, "SharePoint—Strategies and Experiences," the popularity of SharePoint has not been without its complications. For organizations with established enterprise content management (ECM), records management (RM) and business process management (BPM) systems, it has pushed interoperability and information governance to the forefront of key information management issues.⁴ 

Without doubt, Microsoft SharePoint has gaps: things it can't do well without help and things it can't do at all. In its 2010 market intelligence report, AIIM found that 67% of respondents needed customization or third-party products to make SharePoint suitable for their needs.⁵ Coupled with the limitations of SharePoint's architecture, rapid adoption also places significant operational pressure on enterprise IT. Easy to deploy does not mean easy to manage. Managing large farms of SharePoint servers is a costly headache that simply worsens as SharePoint deployments scale to meet growth.

Perhaps the most long-term issue that arises with widespread use of SharePoint is the surge of new technologies that are also gaining traction in the enterprise—technologies that are not Microsoft. Think Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, open source in general and Linux in particular, and so forth. The irony of SharePoint's broad and impressive adoption is that it comes at a time when Microsoft's general hegemony is cracking. It's not a Windows-only world anymore.

The Competitive Challenge

The demands of information management—and the pace with which they're evolving—threaten to outstrip the capabilities of many IT organizations. In the face of these demands, the need to optimize infrastructure and to effectively align existing and new technologies has increased exponentially. In fact, the line between business optimization and infrastructure optimization has blurred. The lack of either compromises competitive strength. As if this were not pressure enough, smaller budgets and shorter ROI requirements leave very little margin for error.

Microsoft SharePoint has become a fixture—some would say a "quick fix"—for many organizations trying to cope in such a challenging environment. But SharePoint does not create a long-term strategic path that enables organizations to capitalize on the value of their information while meeting increasingly strict information governance and compliance requirements.

The bar has risen dramatically in so far as what an information management platform must be able to do. To keep up with the demands of today's global organization, the platform must be high performance, adaptable, scalable, open yet secure and compliant. Its horizon must stretch beyond Microsoft and, certainly, beyond SharePoint. An intelligent information management platform must:

• Support client or device heterogeneity;
• Provide structure for knowledge worker tasks;
• Deliver unified information governance and visibility; and
• Lower operational cost and complexity.

Support client or device heterogeneity. From desktop environments that feature different operating systems to various browsers and mobile devices, client or device technology should never be a barrier to accessing platform capabilities.

Provide structure for knowledge worker tasks. Although knowledge workers do engage in ad-hoc tasks, most of their activities involve repeatable processes that require a set of common capabilities. Providing these capabilities in the context of a process structure helps knowledge workers boost productivity and reduce errors.

Deliver unified information governance and visibility. The greater the volume of information, the more varied the file types, and the more systems on which they reside, the more important unified information governance and visibility become. Unified information governance uses centralized polices to manage retention, disposition, and long-term preservation and enable enterprisewide e-discovery.

Lower operational cost and complexity. Rising content volume means growing cost and complexity unless an information management platform has the tools to continuously consolidate resources and efficiently allocate them to to meet demands and optimize the application for overall performance.

Such a platform is the basis for embracing, extending, and advancing SharePoint's role in the organization to meet the requirements of a comprehensive information platform. To learn more about enhancing your SharePoint environment, visit www.emc.com/sharepoint

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EMC's Intelligent Information Group solutions leverage and extend Microsoft SharePoint capabilities. These solutions enable customers to use the familiar SharePoint interfaces to access business processes, workflows and content, enable organizations to scale SharePoint to accommodate enterprise-class document production systems and ensure enterprisewide information governance. By connecting the right information, people and processes, EMC solutions help mitigate risk associated with content within their environment, reduce administrative and infrastructure costs while enabling SharePoint to improve content visibility.

1 Miles, Doug. "SharePoint__Strategies and Experiences." AIIM Industry Watch (2010)

2 Ibid.

3 "Companies set to increase SharePoint Usage in 2011." Your Story, March 18, 2011.

4 Op. Cit. p5.

5 Op. Cit. p6.d