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ECM: Hidden SharePoint Costs
The SharePoint sales pitch can be compelling — low price, tight integration with Office products, and basic document management and collaboration features. But ‘basic’ features often don’t cut it for customers.
A recent report by AIIM was generally critical of the Microsoft SharePoint solution. AIIM is an organization that is virtually synonymous with ECM and which is generally unbiased. But funding for the report was provided by Microsoft-archrival Oracle, so any conclusions need to be carefully considered.
Top on the list in the report is the fact that Sharepoint is an ‘immature’ product and is generally weak in a number a categories. Those weaknesses make the product incomplete for some organizations, causing them to try to fill the gaps by integrating with other software solutions.
Carl Frappola, author of the report, said “The reality of SharePoint is that while many organizations have deployed SharePoint across multiple departments, most only use it as an internal portal for basic file sharing. Very few are using SharePoint for workflow or business process management, records management or social computing. The current killer applications for SharePoint are employee facing collaboration and light-weight knowledge management. More advanced uses are the rare exceptions.”
The report found that:
– 70 percent of the respondants used SharePoint as a departmental or workgroup solution, compared to just 38 percent with enterprise-wide usages of SharePoint.
– 59 percent cited major scaling issues with SharePoint as a reason for not using it in complex applications
– Most installations of SharePoint as considered as tactical rather than strategic
