Four Ways to Extend Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint's growth over the past several years has been dramatic. Microsoft claims that they have added about 20,000 SharePoint users per day, every day for the last five years. That adds up to over 36 million users! And a recent research study states that nearly two-thirds of companies are actively using SharePoint, and an increasing number of these companies are deploying it throughout their enterprises and consider it a mission- critical application.
SharePoint's growth can be attributed to a few key factors, including:
- Its strong integration with Microsoft Office makes SharePoint a very comfortable system for end users to adopt. SharePoint requires very little—if any—training and works as a natural extension of Office;
- SharePoint has enabled the rapid adoption of collaboration, allowing users to quickly and easily share and work together on documents. In fact, organizations rely upon document collaboration more than any other SharePoint feature; and
- Beyond its features, the rapid growth of workgroup and departmental sites has been fueled by the fact that SharePoint is so simple for small groups to set up.
While these strengths are driving SharePoint's rapid growth, organizations are challenged by its inability to solve some common requirements. These include enterprise-scale architectural concerns, as well as limitations with information management features, including capture, case management and information governance.
Because of these shortcomings, companies that deploy SharePoint must consider tools to fill these gaps. In fact, nearly two-thirds of organizations find that they must customize or add third-party products to enable SharePoint to meet their needs. Let's look at four ways that you can extend SharePoint to meet your complex and evolving business requirements:
Add support for managing paper documents. While organizations strive to digitize their information, the reality is that paper remains the most reliable way for companies to communicate with their customers and business partners. Unfortunately, SharePoint provides no built-in support for scanning documents or enabling organizations to rapidly capture and access content from paper documents.
There are some important requirements that you should consider before investing in a document capture solution. Make sure that you understand how you will be scanning or capturing these documents. Few capture systems provide the flexibility to capture from high-volume scanners, distributed capture throughout the organization, and from other sources, such as fax machines and e-mail servers.
If your documents are critical to your business processes, you must also consider technologies to automate your document capture processes. Intelligent capture solutions will automatically identify document types and extract data from these documents, eliminating the manual processes of sorting documents and keying important data, which can dramatically reduce your processing time and costs.
Effectively manage your enterprise information. When deciding to use SharePoint, it is important to analyze if SharePoint addresses your complete information management requirements. While SharePoint does an excellent job at meeting many content management requirements—including Office 2010 integration, collaboration and fundamental content services—it does not provide the same level of support for all information management requirements. Some of these limitations may affect its ability to meet your organization's requirements.
For example, SharePoint supports searching document metadata and content, but this support is limited to a few file types, such as Microsoft Office documents, and only if those documents are stored within SharePoint. As we all know from experience, adoption of content management systems is never complete, and documents are stored in systems throughout the organization. An enterprise information management solution must support many file types—including images, rich media, XML documents and more—and it must extend search across federated systems and file systems, finding and accessing content wherever it is stored.
Automate your business processes. An important class of content-based solutions goes beyond simply storing documents so you can find them later. Instead, these solutions help you to act upon your information in a consistent, increasingly automated fashion. While SharePoint's workflow may address basic routing requirements, most enterprise requirements go well beyond SharePoint's workflow support and require custom coding.
To support advanced business process requirements, you need tools that orchestrate content, data, process, policies, people, communication and governance. These tools must have the ability to leverage SharePoint's content and collaborative capabilities, while adding integration with other data systems and directing complex processes. Best-in-class business process management tools provide integration with other business applications, queue management and task assignments, intuitive graphical process modeling, agile process development and rapid deployment options.
Create pervasive information governance. While the ability for power users to stand up SharePoint systems has been critical in SharePoint's rapid growth, the resulting ad hoc proliferation of SharePoint systems brings considerable risk. Despite the best of intentions, this lack of control leads to completely disorganized systems.
Two symptoms of SharePoint's viral growth also challenge an organization's ability to effectively govern its content: inactive sites that are not properly archived, and duplicate content that arises due to the project-specific nature of SharePoint sites. The downside of these symptoms is that the resulting information bloat impacts SharePoint sites quickly, affecting performance and preventing backups within the allowed time frames. Effective information governance systems automatically archive inactive content and externalize large documents to optimize SharePoint performance and system backup.
And beyond addressing your SharePoint-specific governance concerns, most agree that the best practice is to consider information governance holistically, regardless of whether the content is stored in SharePoint, in another business system, or on the file system.
While there is little doubt that SharePoint will continue to play an important role in managing important content within enterprises, there are several steps that you can take to ensure that your solution addresses all of your information management requirements. By extending SharePoint's capabilities and improving its ability to manage, process, and govern your information, you can leverage the best- in-class capabilities that SharePoint brings without having to sacrifice enterprise information management best practices.
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.