The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Enterprise Content Management: SharePoint Gaps Identified in AIIM Reports
In 2010, Microsoft estimated that 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint with more than 100 million users worldwide. That’s clearly a mark of success.
But what about some of the gaps and pain points that users experience with SharePoint? One issue is pricing. Especially when compared to Open Source alternatives, SharePoint may not come out on top. Another big issue is the stack. Many companies prefer not to standardize on the Windows .NET platform. For example, many organizations prefer to use a cheaper Open Source operating system for their servers, like Linux.
And now, a couple of new reports from AIIM spotlight some additional weaknesses of Microsoft SharePoint enterprise implementations. The first of the AIIM studies found that while out of the box, SharePoint met the needs of about half of the organizations survey, about a third of users cited issues in the areas of document management, records management and compliance. 54 percent of SharePoint organizations, for example, say that SharePoint can’t handle all of their needs out of the box and that they resort to seeking out third-party add-ons to bridge the gaps, particularly in the areas of mobile, search, workflow and social.
And the report found that integrations with other systems were often difficult. SharePoint often co-exists with numerous other data systems in an organizations, and there is typically no connection between SharePoint and the other systems.
Users of SharePoint also have concerns about security. Among organizations using SharePoint, another AIIM survey, sponsored by HiSoftware, reported the following results:
- 57 percent worry that SharePoint doesn’t meet their security or compliance requirements
- 38 percent say that SharePoint doesn’t meet their information security needs
- 13 percent say that SharePoint security is “a disaster waiting to happen.”
- 24 percent say that they have security concerns about mobile access to SharePoint content
David Jones, market analyst at AIIM International, said that “the issues at hand are staggering when you take a deeper look at the numbers. SharePoint security is on the edge of being out of control. An alarming 70% of organizations say that they rely on humans to manage security vulnerabilities, even as they continue to drop sensitive information such as financial and HR data into SharePoint.”
Kurt Mueffelmann, CEO of HiSoftware , said that “More than 60% of Microsoft Enterprise customers use SharePoint, and it has emerged as the central repository that organizations use to put all sorts of data and information for easy internal access. But this access comes with challenges, and that’s the struggle we see in these survey results. Companies generally have governance rules and know what should and shouldn’t be shared, but because SharePoint grew so rapidly, they’ve been unprepared to deal with the platform’s security risks.”
