It’s Time for ECM to Evolve
4. Best practices, governance and information architecture. Folks are quick to dismiss SharePoint as an ECM platform because there are not well-established best practices, governance and IA around ECM. That is a debatable point in my mind; there’s actually a lot of information out there on these topics. Granted, it’s not all good, but there are plenty of knowledgeable folks having thoughtful discussions on these and other topics. I will say that it’s equally debatable whether or not there are good best practices, governance and IA available for all the other ECM platforms out there. I guess the point here is if someone asserts that they are hesitant to implement SharePoint for ECM for a lack of the above, ask them to see the above for any of the others. It’s just kind of a weak objection and I encourage you to call it out as such.
5. Conventional wisdom is that SharePoint doesn’t scale. This is almost always asserted by analysts in the ECM space in one form or another. A lot of times it’s not such a definitive declaration, it’s more of an “at least we don’t think it scales” or “there is not enough evidence to support scalability claims” or something like that. I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it scales quite nicely, both on its own and with the help of add-ons. KnowledgeLake published a whitepaper a couple years ago that showed tens of millions of documents managed in a farm with all the content sitting in SQL. It worked without issue. Could they have scaled that out even further and more economically if they remoted the BLOBs with something like StoragePoint? Most definitely yes, but that’s more of a storage cost and to some extent a SQL cost consideration rather than a question of the architecture’s scalability. That being said, there are definitely performance and scalability improvements to be had when you remote the BLOBs from SQL, especially with bulk (think mail room scanning or customer statements imported from a mainframe AFP stream) operations. So analysts, naysayers and the dude from Open Text who calls it “ScarePoint” every time he does a presentation (you know who you are), stop hiding behind a perceived lack of evidence that SharePoint scales or the fear that it actually might.
6. Risk avoidance. This is the person who hates keeping all his content in that legacy repository, but is risk averse. No one has been able to convince him that he can easily and without issue move all that content from legacy platform X to SharePoint. No one has been able to convince him that it’s an affordable and low- to no-risk exercise. No one has been able to convince him that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time with little or no impact to business continuity.
I frankly think this starts with a general level of immaturity within the Microsoft partner ecosystem on what ECM is. I hear a lot of partners talk about ECM and proclaim themselves ECM experts, but I don’t regularly see evidence to back up the talk. That has translated into failed implementations and burnt fingers and contributes to the myth that SharePoint can’t be “my ECM platform.” It really speaks to the accessibility and approachability of the platform along with the massive size of the partner ecosystem. It creates a dynamic where an organization has to weed through all the partners out there to find the ones that really do understand ECM, can translate that to SharePoint and in the end help the customers achieve their goals. You think I’m unfairly asserting something here? Go to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble or go search Amazon.com for both SharePoint and FileNet. Not only are you not going to find much on FileNet (or Documentum or Open Text or Stellent), but you won’t find anything that ends in “for Dummies.” I’m not suggesting that the “ECM experts” in the SharePoint ecosystem are dummies; I just think the ecosystem has generally over-simplified what ECM is and has little expertise with legacy ECM platforms and getting content out of them and into SharePoint.
7. Job security. No, this is not the same person talked about in #6. This person likes all the content in that legacy repository. It was hard to stand up, it’s hard and expensive to maintain and he/she has created the perception that if anyone other than them even looks at it the whole thing will come crashing down. This is the clown that keeps the person in #6 from doing anything, acting in their own best interests and not the best interests of their organization. They like things just the way they are and there is at least one of these folks in every organization. If SharePoint has any chance at becoming an enterprisewide standard for content management within an organization, these folks have to be disarmed or marginalized. You’re also never going to be their friend, so don’t waste any time trying to be.
There are most certainly other reasons, but I think this is a good start. Feel free to challenge my lucky seven reasons why more companies haven’t adopted SharePoint.
If you’re currently burdened by expensive and hard-to-maintain legacy content management platforms, or have content in more places than you can count and want to get all or most of it into SharePoint but don’t know where to start, then reach out to us. Metalogix has solutions for both getting content from any number of content sources into SharePoint and efficiently and cost-effectively managing it once it’s there. We also have partner companies and friends that can help you where we can’t and would be happy to point you in the right direction,
www.storagepoint.com.