BPM: SharePoint Stumbles with Enterprise Workflows

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is due to be officially announced tomorrow, but thanks to early beta releases and a constant stream of news coverage, the announcement is a bit anti-climatic.  Analysts and early adopters have been kicking the tires for a while.

Last month Forrester Research issued a report that looked at one aspect of SharePoint that has them concerned: the large number of enterprises that are trying to use SharePoint as a Business Process Managment (BPM) platform.  The report cautions that SharePoint is targeting collaboration in the enterprise, not BPM.  The report says:  “Despite Microsoft’s best attempts to position the SharePoint platform for content and collaboration, many people still see it as a [BPM] platform. The process management features of SharePoint 2010 are better than MOSS 2007, but they’re more limited than most modern BPM suites”.

When polled by Forrester, 47 percent of 220 IT departments said that they are deploying SharePoint as their primary BPM platform.  And that’s a problem.  The report cautions that SharePoint is best used for very simple tracking-type applications, but when trying to apply it to enterprise BPM there is typically way too much custom code required to model the process, which ultimately eliminates many of the benefits SharePoint  might have as a BPM platform.

The report says that “SharePoint works best where the process scope is departmental in nature, or where applications rely on highly representative procedures. While it is also possible to link in external sources of enterprise data (such as a back-end SAP system), the issues arise when these processes span SharePoint site collections.  Assuming a top-down regime, plan on using the administrative features of SharePoint to control enterprisewide deployments.”

CMSWire explains much of SharePoint’s problem with BPM boils down to the software architecture used within SharePoint.  “The big culprit that limits SharePoint for BPM solutions is its underlying architecture. SharePoint uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WP), which supports only two process patterns: sequence and machine state. This results in SharePoint working best on the procedural end of the process spectrum, while most SharePoint deployments are focused on on the opposite end — as practices.”