Filling in the SharePoint Document Process Gaps with Advanced Rendering

Enterprise content management (ECM) has become a business-critical application, and while EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet and OpenText have dominated this space historically, Microsoft SharePoint is slowly achieving significant traction as the “ECM for the masses” by reducing the high cost, large footprint and long implementation times often associated with traditional solutions.

However, while SharePoint’s proven collaboration and portal capabilities have driven adoption, the adoption of SharePoint as a full ECM remains low. Despite many added features SharePoint still comes up short in a number of critical ECM functional requirements, such as records management, rich media, workflow, governance and document output management, including Advanced Rendering. As a result, AIIM has found that approximately 54% of organizations are looking to add third-party add-ons to enhance SharePoint’s capabilities.

Identifying the SharePoint Gaps

One of the largest gaps within SharePoint lies in document output management. By improving the point where people and content intersect within SharePoint, end users can become much more productive and organizations can increase compliance, reduce costs and risks, and improve the value of their SharePoint investment.

SharePoint content exists in several formats, often ranging in the hundreds, including many legacy structures, making it difficult for end users to share files with colleagues or external stakeholders who lack the native authoring applications. To enable SharePoint as a complete ECM, a key best practice consideration is to ensure that the content is delivered to the right place, to the right people, in the right format and for its intended use.

Collaborating with colleagues using this myriad of file types is challenging. Successful document output management solutions address this by converting the volume and variety of content into standardized formats such as PDF—a platform-agnostic format that enables ease of use, long-term access without reliance on native content creation applications and greater control for administrators.

Focusing on the Content in Enterprise Content Management

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is an ISO-defined output format and truly the only digital equivalent of paper-based documents. Enterprise organizations and ECM vendors have broadly adopted the standard as it offers a number of key benefits:

• Retention and protection of the original content in its native form;
• Acessibility and consistent viewing on virtually any technology from traditional PCs to mobile devices;
• Use as a standard for compliant document submission in regulated environments;
• Approved by many government agencies globally as the format to make information publically available;
• Support for digital signatures and document security settings; and
• Availability of options for long-term archiving (PDF/A).

By standardizing the output format of content within SharePoint to PDF, organizations can achieve a number of important benefits, including:

• Enhanced collaboration and sharing with internal and external stakeholders and reduced need for native authoring application software;
• Fulfillment of ongoing requirements for long-term archiving for corporate benefit and regulatory compliance purposes; and
• Smaller file sizes to reduce bandwidth and improve viewability on mobile devices.

Next-Generation Document-to-PDF Conversion

While most people assume PDF is a stale technology or a “given,” believe it or not, all PDFs are not created equal. There are a number of criteria that must be evaluated when looking at document conversion programs. These generally fall into two classes: document fidelity and enterprise functionality.

A shareware or freeware program converting a document to PDF does not guarantee rendition fidelity resulting in any number of unacceptable outputs. As such, systems need to be put in place to ensure that information is transformed accurately and that the intended content and message is enhanced and not diluted. The highest fidelity rendition is an exact match to the original. While this may seem like an easy task completed through simple “print-to-PDF” functionality in free conversion software, the reality is that true fidelity is very difficult to achieve. Basic rendering ?tools create conversions which have missing content, formatting errors and poorly interpreted data.

Moreover, IT staff need to provide this functionality in a manner that is in line with their overall system goals—storage availability, uptime SLA and performance—while controlling overall costs. On an enterprise level, organizations require solutions that promise high availability, performance-oriented scalability, load balancing, fault tolerance, centralized management, integration with multiple ECM systems and a metadata-driven toolset to minimize human intervention—features that cannot be found in desktop “save-as-PDF” software.

The answer is in Advanced Rendering. Advanced Rendering technology meets the needs of organizations that are looking to enhance SharePoint’s document output management capabilities and create high-fidelity PDFs on an enterprise scale. Advanced Rendering delivers on both business and IT levels, satisfying fidelity and enterprise architecture requirements.

Document output management solutions, if deployed properly, can significantly enhance SharePoint’s capabilities and improve its viability as an enterprise-class ECM system. It enables organizations to build a functionally robust ECM solution on SharePoint without the big investment in time, training and money associated by deploying traditional ECM platforms.

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Adlib is the expert in Advanced Rendering technology,automating high-fidelity PDF conversion across the document lifecycle. Adlib enables the world’s largest organizations to improve the efficiency of document-intensive business processes to optimize productivity, mitigate risk and reduce costs.

To learn more about optimizing document processes in SharePoint, visit www.adlibsoftware.com and read the full white paper “Enhancing MS SharePoint to Support ECM-Grade Document Output Management” in the Resources area.

For more info, contact us at info@adlibsoftware.com or 1-866-991-1704.