Delivering True ECM with SharePoint

Many organizations worldwide have their C-level executives sitting at the boardroom, hemming and hawing over which strategies they must adopt in order to maintain a competitive advantage. There are plenty of business needs scattered throughout the enterprise—improving business processes, fostering collaboration among knowledge workers, providing access to all company-wide information, making better business decisions faster… the list can go on in perpetuity.

The key here, though, is how to tie all of these needs together. Today’s economic environment, while vastly improving recently, is still favoring the budget-conscious and cost-minded. There must be one initiative that can help tie these disparate needs together, all while improving business practices and demonstrating a tangible return on investment.

That promise can be achieved with enterprise content management (ECM).

First, what is ECM? Is this another one of those ephemeral terms often thrown around boardrooms and staff meetings, with no real meaning behind it? Instead of pigeonholing ECM by blindly defining it as records management, Web content management or a document repository, let’s clearly define its goal: ECM seamlessly connects a company’s business processes, knowledge workers and organization-wide information. ECM constitutes a fully integrated platform and architectural framework that brings about total collaboration, intelligent content lifecycle management and greater productivity. In short, ECM is a virtual ecosystem for your organization’s stakeholders.

Sound vague enough? Good. ECM is meant to cater to specific business requirements, not the other way around. The end-product of ECM can mean something different to virtually any organization depending on its specific business needs, but there are several key objectives that nonetheless must be met:

• Establish control over the ever-growing volume of records and documents to mitigate task duplication and minimize time spent searching for information;
• Automate business processes to replace manual paper processing, thereby increasing productivity and enabling online collaboration;
• Streamline the authoring and publishing of information to knowledge workers, customers and partners; and
• Flexibly meet evolving regulatory compliance obligations, including document retention policies, unstructured information management and records management.

While these are all viable objectives seemingly any business should meet, is there a technological platform available that can meet these demands?

SharePoint Server 2010—The Age of ECM
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 was renowned for its ability to help organizations manage their information and bridge the oft-dreaded divide among structured content, unstructured content and social computing. Many industry experts, however, felt that MOSS 2007 did not have enough features to allow the platform to truly help organizations with their ECM initiatives.

Microsoft’s latest platform release, SharePoint Server 2010, has numerous enhancements seeking to tie together traditional content management, social capabilities and search with simple management to drive ECM initiatives worldwide.

According to the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM), there are several major improvements in Microsoft’s latest platform release firmly positioning SharePoint as an optimal home for ECM initiatives. One of the biggest limitations in MOSS 2007 was the lack of a single source of truth for documents and other content. No unique object IDs meant the links would break if files were moved or renamed. Furthermore, content would have to be copied throughout the system instead of having pointers to a single source of content, unnecessarily taking up space in SQL Server content databases and bringing up valid compliance concerns. SharePoint Server 2010 unveiled two new features to combat these limitations—Document ID and Document Set—which offer persistent links and grouping of related documents so they share a common homepage, workflows and integrated archival process.

Speaking of archival and compliance, SharePoint Server 2010 offers in-place records management, which enables SharePoint documents, blogs, wikis, Web pages and list items to be declared records in their current locations, without necessarily having to transport the documents into the records center. SharePoint Server 2010 also offers more robust reports based on audit data at the site collection, site, list/library, and/or item level for bolstered satisfaction of regulatory obligations. MOSS 2007 only reported on audit data from the site-collection level.

ECM requires a cohesive, enterprise-level taxonomy structure by which all knowledge workers can abide. While MOSS 2007 did not provide this capability natively, SharePoint Server 2010 does with the introduction of the “metadata store.” Organizations can now enable users to create the taxonomy structure—including hierarchy, product categories and worldwide locations—and publish it to SharePoint. Along with enterprise-level taxonomy, SharePoint Server 2010 also delivers the same level of search—with metadata-driven refinement panels, content indexing and the ability to search and retrieve data from content sources both inside and outside of SharePoint—with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search and FAST Search.

The platform now also offers greater extensibility, presentation and editing for line-of-business applications and data—such as CRM and ERP systems—with Business Connectivity Services (BCS). MOSS 2007 had introduced Business Data Catalog for this purpose, but it only connected line-of-business systems into SharePoint in a read-only mode.

It’s clear that SharePoint Server 2010 has made large improvements to enable organizations to use the platform for their ECM initiatives, but there are some challenges that still remain and require the use of third-party solutions. Let’s view these challenges in the prism of the five stages that must be addressed when creating an ECM system: capture; storage and access; delivery; preservation; and management.

Unleashing SharePoint for ECM
Utilizing SharePoint Server 2010 for ECM demands proper planning. As noted earlier, there are five stages that must be addressed when crafting an ECM system. Let’s discuss these in further detail, outlining the key objectives for each.

In the first stage, capture, organizations centralize their company-wide assets into one digital repository, the only place knowledge workers can create, present and manage all content regardless of where it originally resided. This entails digitizing any paper media or files, and uploading them into the ECM system efficiently. Then, the digitized media must be tagged with appropriate metadata for indexing and enterprise search. Content from other digital legacy data stores—whether Lotus Notes, EMC Documentum or even local file shares—must be migrated into SharePoint while still maintaining all associated metadata to consolidate enterprise content and reduce legacy licensing costs. One final consideration is whether or not organizations want to eliminate some legacy file shares. Any ECM system should have the capability to connect with this legacy content and stream it through SharePoint, opening it up to its management and presentation features without the need for direct import into the platform’s SQL Server content databases.

The next stage, storage and access, delves into efficiently managing native SQL Server content database storage to unify enterprise content residing on disparate legacy systems. The vast majority of content uploaded by users is unstructured data—audio files, video files, PDFs, pictures, Word documents—which then turn into binary large objects (BLOBs) in SQL, potentially degrading platform performance. Organizations must manage the growing amount of this unstructured data in order to maximize its potential for scalability and performance, while efficiently archiving content in a manner ensuring all compliance objectives are met. Because many organizations now have presences worldwide, global users must have real-time access to all up-to-date content, as well as unified accessibility rights management of all end-users.

Delivery ensures all the proper stakeholders have access to the right content, at the right time. Organizations must ensure they have a unified presentation platform for all legacy enterprise content—regardless of source and type—subject to enterprise-content search. Content and customizations must be propagated automatically from staging/testing through to production, so as to limit human error and promote a culture of governance. The ECM system must also have timely delivery of comprehensive reporting for management and compliance purposes.

End-users must then have the confidence that all content and data in an ECM system, and the ECM system itself, is fully protected against accidental deletion or corruption. This is where the next ECM stage, preservation, comes in. All enterprise content must be protected in a manner conserving storage resources while enabling fast, full-fidelity restoration of all prior metadata and securities. The ECM platform itself must also be fully protected—including system configurations, customizations and workflows—through customizable system backups. Organizations must also ensure a seamless transition to a warm stand-by system should the main production system fail as well as swift platform restoration following a disaster event.