This next blog entry is a continuation from the previous entry which was on information management.
Within the last 3-4 months the doubts I have in regard to Microsoft SharePoint have increased. The same questions have arisen such as why is SharePoint so popular? Why do many experts in this space think that this is the end all and be all solution for ECM and Electronic Discovery? A so-called silver bullet or even better no assemblies required just add plenty of water. Some truly believe this is the only way electronic discovery should be handled in the future. My pessimism has risen because of this. Do they see something I do not? Is price the overriding reason to use SharePoint? Why is SharePoint as popular as say something like Twitter? Is SharePoint more like a religious experience? Or are they simply holding on to this platform as blind faith and hopes that this will be the ultimate ECM solution in the future? I decided to delve much deeper into this and have spent the last 30 plus days researching and looking into SharePoint. The goal for me was to see if I could possibly convert to this religion that so many on a few lit support boards already are members of. After this research will I become a SharePoint preacher? Would I be able to spread the word to future followers? Below are my thoughts and analysis.
Before beginning let us talk about ECM.
As defined by AIIM “Enterprise content management (ECM) is the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”
AIIM (www.aiim.org) is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information. For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes.
So instead of saving your documents onto your desktop or shared network folder where it may not be found for months it would save the documents into a system that will help you keep track of them. ECM is not just software it is a platform. Where as everyone can agree on using an organized and systematic approach to their management of information. This is of course why it is stored, kept, shared and ultimately retrieved. Below are a few of the major players in regards to ECM Platforms:
- Open Text - LiveLink ECM Suite
- HQ: Waterloo, Canada - Vignette - V7 ECM Suite
- HQ: Austin, TX, USA - Hyland Software, Inc. - OnBase 7.2
- HQ: Westlake, OH - Microsoft - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- HQ: Redmond, WA - Documentum (EMC) - Documentum D6
- HQ: Pleasanton, CA, USA - Xerox - DocuShare 6.1
- HQ: Stamford, CT, USA - IBM - FileNet P8 Platform
- HQ: White Plains, NY, USA - Interwoven - ECM Solutions
- HQ: San Jose, CA, USA - Oracle - Enterprise Content Management Suite 10gR3
- HQ: Redwood Shores, CA, USA
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State of ECM Industry 2009
“AIIM's annual State of the ECM Industry research found that compared to recent years, cost saving has taken a clear lead over compliance as the main business driver for investments in document and records management. Email is still out of control, with 55% of organizations having little or no confidence that important emails are recorded, complete and retrievable. Management of content types like SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are largely off the corporate radar in 75% of organizations and their lack of inclusion in the corporate archive is a major risk.”
What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is a portal-based collaboration platform from Microsoft. It might be the most widely available collaboration tool for legal professionals, especially because it is attached to the Microsoft Office suite of tools. SharePoint has drawn a lot of attention from large law firms, particularly over the past few years and especially among those firms running a Windows Server environment with Office and Exchange.
SharePoint is contained almost entirely within a web browser, making it easy for anyone with an Internet connection to access. It can be used internally or externally. SharePoint also integrates well with Microsoft Office products and it can be configured to pull data from other law office programs, databases, websites, and other sources. A SharePoint portal page is composed of modules called web parts, which are components that implement a specified function. SharePoint sites are customizable, meaning that users can add the web parts they need for each specific project. A SharePoint site can be used within a firm or company via the organization's intranet, made available to clients on an extranet, or published to the Internet.
The SharePoint family is composed of three different applications. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is the basic application, and is a free add-on to the Windows Server. WSS offers the basic portal infrastructure, allowing collaborative editing of documents and document organization as well as creation of to do lists, alerts, and discussion boards. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) improves upon WSS, adding better document management, search functionality, navigation features, RSS…etc.. For more experienced SharePoint users, the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (MOSD) is an HTML editor that helps users design their own SharePoint sites. It also provides enterprise search, document and content management, and workflow tools, while featuring strong integration with Microsoft Office.
With MOSS, users can view and edit Office documents directly within a web browser, making it simple to work on documents from anyplace with an Internet connection. The SharePoint services can also be accessed through Microsoft Outlook, and users of Office 2007 can synchronize their Outlook calendars and task lists with their SharePoint counterparts. Another advantage of using SharePoint in a firm environment is the product's ability to fully index all of the documents stored in its library, so that users throughout the organization can search across all libraries. Yes, there is much strength with using SharePoint.
With respect to records management and compliance, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers the following integrated capabilities says Microsoft:
- “Information management and retention enables organizations to control the way content is managed to enforce compliance with corporate, legal or governmental policies. To define information management policies for their sites, organizations can use the following predefined policy features individually or in combination: auditing, bar codes and expiration. They also can develop custom information management policies.
- The Records Center site template is designed to help organizations implement their records management and retention programs. This site template extends standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 features with additional records management capabilities: vault abilities that help ensure the integrity of records stored within the Records Center, records routing, information management policy enforcement, and the ability to add records that are subject to litigation or investigations to a hold list.
- eDiscovery in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables organizations to streamline the process of document retrieval with integrated search and the placing of records on hold that are subject to litigation or investigation. Records on hold are suspended from records management policies and expiration, ensuring access throughout the litigation process.
Information Rights Management (IRM) allows organizations to limit the actions that users can take on files that have been downloaded from SharePoint lists or libraries. IRM encrypts the downloaded files and limits the set of users and programs that are allowed to decrypt these files. IRM can also limit the rights of the users who are allowed to read files so they cannot take actions such as printing copies of the files or copying text from them.”
SharePoint Weaknesses
There are several scalability issues with SharePoint. Based on numerous surveys done by large corporations as well as AIIM the greatest amongst these are performance issues when increasing quantity or size of the document repository, lack of support for complex document architectures.
The AIIM survey of 512 organizations that use MOSS has found that while a majority of organizations use SharePoint, less than half use it at the enterprise level. It seems based on this survey most are using it for its robust file sharing capabilities.
MOSS is rarely used for more advanced functions including:
· Web content management
· Digital asset management
· Business Process automation
· Records management
· Forms management
Of those tools and applications that are being used:
· Search
· Collaboration
· Portal
· Document management
Of all the surveys and reports I have seen online and asked large organizations the number one reason for deploying MOSS: it’s inexpensive. While I will agree that MOSS is an inexpensive solution for a small organization, it is in fact quite the opposite for a large organization looking at enterprise licenses – a scenario which can be outrageously expensive and even considerably more than the top of the line ECM platforms on the market. So again I scratch my head at those recommending this for large firms and organizations who state it is cheap.
This is from the AIIM website in regards to a survey on Sharepoint. “SharePoint is great on document management and extremely poor with records management. The records management functionality, known as the Records Center is a MOSS component and does not function in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Thus, it requires further investment beyond SharePoint itself. Also, the Records Center is a platform, not a near-turnkey records application like that available from other companies that offer ECM platforms. Most records functionality has to be built using the toolset. There is no auto-declaration of records for example, nor rendition control or Clawbacks. SharePoint provides only the most basic of records management features.
Put frankly, SharePoint does not provide adequate functionality to address records management and therefore is not heavily used in applications that require this functionality, such as compliance and e-discovery. Those who are using it “somewhat” are likely using the SharePoint environment as a platform for file sharing – only – and have augmented it with other integrated technologies and processes.
Clearly RM is an area of functionality that most users believe SharePoint does not provide well. So, in scenarios in which RM level control is desired or necessary, then yes, the integration of an RM system with SharePoint can be very beneficial, and render a less-risk SharePoint environment. On the other hand this does not simplify deployment – but rather complicates it. Integration of additional functionality such as RM, was the number 2 greatest challenge sited by survey takers, second only to adequate personnel and toolsets to execute the integration.
SharePoint provides facilitated sharing of files, not necessarily in a secure or controlled environment (read RM.) So yes, in my opinion, an organization should "reignite" its RM programs when deploying SharePoint, at least to ask IF the SharePoint collections warrant records-level control. If an executive is insisting that SharePoint should “simply be implemented to ultimately solve the records management issues of the organization", a little and simple education is necessary. This is a perception problem of what records management is. Have him/her describe what they mean by records management. If focus is on facilitated sharing – proceed. If focus is, on the other hand, on compliance, point them to these survey findings and beg that they learn from the experiences of those that went before him/her.
File sharing and file document storage are basically the same functionality. File sharing is typically used to denote common access (sharing) of files over a network, usually following a peer-to-peer model. (This is the big difference between file sharing and a simple file system – the ability to share files without replication.) And, yes, based on the survey responses as well as my general, observations, the MOST predominate application of SharePoint is file sharing/ file document storage.”
The SharePoint system effectively captures and manages records and revisions. The new SharePoint release states new electronic Discovery capabilities that allow the user to search for and find specific SharePoint records in response to a discovery request. This capability is wonderful but only if you are responding to a small discovery request against just SharePoint records. With electronic discovery we all know that the odds of only searching one type of ESI are slim. They are some weaknesses because of this.
The search results page is limited to just 50 entries. Electronic Discovery usually never targets just a SharePoint data set. The EDD process targets large amounts of ESI that spans numerous applications and storage locations. Because of this an effective EDD capability will allow the user to create a search query that will find all responsive ESI across data producing systems including Exchange email, Instant Messaging systems, Windows file systems and SharePoint systems. This is another point how SharePoint is not there yet with electronic discovery.
While SharePoint may not compete feature to feature, it does compete to be positioned as a viable competitor to any ECM platform. As Microsoft continues to enhance SharePoint, and there is every indication that they will, it will only become more competitive. Although they have not yet integrated it into SharePoint Microsoft has leapfrogged into enterprise search with the acquisition of FAST. To date, FAST functionality has not yet been tightly integrated into the SharePoint environment, but that is inevitable, and when that occurs, the features and functions of FAST will catapult SharePoint enterprise search functionality, positioning it among the leaders. SharePoint still has many problems in terms of weaknesses with records management and electronic discovery. It is an ECM solution that will continue to get better as these weaknesses are addressed. Yet after this research and talking with many people in the ECM space I will not switch religions until SharePoint shows me much more. Until SharePoint fixes its number of issues with records management it will never be at the top of my list for ECM solutions. Records Management features D Electronic Discovery features C File Sharing features A+ Overall Grade B References to this blog article: http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx http://www.informationarchitected.com/ Next Up: Rumblings on ESI John Randall President Randall Consulting jrandall@randallconsulting.net
