Exploring SharePoint's Place in ECM

Microsoft previews 2010 version to more than 7,000 conference attendees.

LAS VEGAS—Is SharePoint an enterprise content management (ECM) application? That has certainly been one of the most popular questions surrounding the document imaging industry since late 2006, when Microsoft first revealed the features of SharePoint 2007. After attending the recent SharePoint Conference 2009, held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, I definitely have some opinions on this topic. First off, as I think we all know, SharePoint is not really an application–rather it's a platform on which applications can be developed. Second, while SharePoint certainly can be deployed across an enterprise, its applications are typically managed on the departmental level.

The third major opinion I came away with, after hearing plenty of discussion on the new features in the upcoming SharePoint 2010, is that Microsoft is focusing on document management. The new edition, which is being released for beta this month, offers upgrades in areas like meta data management, records management, scalability, document grouping, and search. These were all challenges for users trying to do anything more than lightweight document management with previous versions of SharePoint.

"With SharePoint 2010, we made a big leap forward in the area of content management," noted Jeff Teper, Microsoft's corporate VP, Office Business Platform, during his keynote address at the conference. "We looked at the top 10 to 20 pieces of feedback we received related to content management and tried to take off as many as we could."

It is important to point out, however, that, like all of its SharePoint predecessors, the 2010 version does not feature any document imaging capabilities out of the box. Also, SharePoint's ability to address the complex workflow requirements of many imaging-related applications, in areas like transactional content management, is still questionable.

Not that these capabilities can't be introduced into SharePoint. In fact, we've written many times in DIR about solutions for adding document imaging to SharePoint. And there were plenty of those solutions on display at the 2009 Conference. KnowledgeLake, AtalaSoft, Laserfiche, Kofax, Hyland, KeyMark, Psigen, Kodak, GoScan, MFiles, Nuance, eCopy, Open Bee, and SpringCM all exhibited technology for managing images in SharePoint. And most of the exhibitors seemed happy with their booth traffic. "This is the best trade show I've been at this year," said Bill Bither, founder and CEO AtalaSoft, which announced version 2.0 of its Vizit SP imaging viewer, at the event.

Yes, the event featured some 7,600 attendees–the majority of which were SharePoint users. And there could have been more. I understand there was a waiting list to get in, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer joked (at least I think he was joking) that people were scalping passes outside Mandalay Bay. This was impressive considering that almost every other conference I've been at in the previous year reported a decline in attendance due to the global recession. The Microsoft SharePoint Conference almost doubled in attendance compared to the 2008 event, which was held 19 months earlier in Seattle.

What's in SharePoint 2010?

The big attraction was a preview of SharePoint 2010, which is due to be released for beta this month. According to Microsoft's overview, which was distributed at the conference, "SharePoint 2010 is the Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web."

"What is SharePoint? I get that question all the time," said Ballmer during his keynote. "Is it a collaboration platform? Yes. Does it provide business insights? Yes. Can it do workflow, document management; can it be used for social networking? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

From our standpoint, it's the document management capabilities that are of the most interest. It's these features that make SharePoint a potential imaging platform. Microsoft document imaging partner KnowledgeLake did a presentation entitled "ECM in SharePoint 2010—Features that Rock." It detailed some of the document management improvements Microsoft is making:

• improved data connectivity for exchanging documents and data with business applications;
• improved list validations for better indexing;
• new enterprise meta data capabilities for better managing taxonomies and keywords, including the ability to share meta data collections across site collections;
• a more scalable architecture—this includes the ability to crawl more than 50 million items, the ability to handle larger lists and libraries (according to Teper, over a million items in a list or folder), better back-up of content databases, and better responsiveness when users are working with large amounts of data;
• improved search—the ability to deploy multiple index servers improves scalability and performance; there are other new features as well, including the option of upgrading to the FAST Search engine—enterprise technology developed by a Norwegian company [see DIR 4/8/05] that Microsoft acquired last year;
• improved remote BLOB storage—this is the process of moving binary large objects (BLOBs) off the content database and onto external storage; it's utilized by most traditional ECM platforms because it improves performance when working with larger content items like document images; with SharePoint 2007, it was typically accomplished by leveraging Microsoft's published EBS (external BLOB storage) standard [see DIR 7/17/09]; for SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has developed a new "remote BLOB storage" (RBS) protocol; RBS is designed to provide better consistency between the pointers that remain in the database and the externally stored BLOBs;
• an improved audit trail that can now be set up around document, site, and list events, such as checking in or out, or editing, documents, and doing a search on a list;
• the ability to utilize unique document I.D. numbers that remain with documents if they are moved;
• improved content organization features, such as the ability to automatically create folders based on meta data and the ability to automatically route content to specific libraries based on rules;
• the ability to create document sets, which are groups of documents that are automatically given the same meta data, and can be versioned and sent through workflows together.

Microsoft has also introduced an in-place records management feature that enables any user with the proper permissions to apply records management to a document without having to move that document to a special records management collection.

Imaging follows EDM

These features certainly will make SharePoint 2010 a more formidable document management platform than in the past. In fact, SharePoint is starting to remind me of the electronic document management (EDM) systems that were so hot 10 years ago. At that time, EDM vendors' like Documentum, Open Text, PC Docs, iManage and even some WCM vendors like Interwoven, Vignette, and BroadVision, were starting to eclipse document imaging vendors because everybody thought paper was going away.

After the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, we all started to realize that maybe paper wasn't going to disappear, and that the best way to manage paper may be to image it, so that it can at least be handled with close to the same efficiency as electronic documents. All of a sudden EDM and WCM specialists started paying good money for document imaging vendors. EMC bought Captiva to pair with Documentum, IBM bought FileNet, Stellent bought Optika, Vignette acquired Tower Technology, Open Text bought Captaris, and so on.

Well, we don't necessarily think Microsoft is going to buy an imaging company, after all, it has had plenty of opportunities to do so in the past. But SharePoint's adoption as an EDM platform will certainly create plenty of opportunity for imaging vendors. Because history has shown that imaging adoption will follow EDM adoption.

Where's the rubber hitting the road?

The current issue seems to be that SharePoint is still so immature as an EDM platform that, in many cases, users haven't even thought about using it for imaging. For example, at the conference, I moderated a panel for eCopy entitled, "Boosting the Value of SharePoint with Document Imaging." The panel featured end users from big-name organizations Nike and Arizona State, yet it was attended by less than 50 people (a late room change didn't help matters.)

One question I was asking exhibitors was, "How many of the 7,600 attendees really know what production document imaging is?" Our best guess was 10-15%. Still, if there are really more than 130 million SharePoint users as Teper indicated, even 10% of that (13 million) is a pretty good market for imaging.

AtalaSoft's Bither told me that his company is starting to see some traction for its Vizit SP viewer. Customers include BearingPoint, Covidien (formerly Tyco Healthcare), and the U.K.-based Cooperative Group through an implementation by Hitachi Consulting. "Our early customers are using Vizit SP to improve their document-centric workflows in SharePoint and preview documents prior to opening them and consuming bandwidth," Bither told DIR. "In the case of Covidien, they use a production scanning application for structured forms, but are using Vizit SP to manually index unstructured paper documents that are scanned into SharePoint."

These don't necessarily sound like high-volume, transaction content management applications. In addition, Arizona State and Nike were mainly leveraging imaging for distributed collaboration, rather than document-intensive workflow. That said, both organizations seemed very happy with the ROI they were receiving, mainly on investment in eCopy technology for capturing documents into SharePoint.

In addition, when we spoke with KnowledgeLake this summer, its VP of business development noted that 80% of its business was coming in the SMB market [see DIR 7/17/09], and, on top of that, the St. Louis-based ISV recently announced plans for a sub-$10,000 X-Series version of its product to be targeted at the mid-market through copier dealers like IKON.

And that is kind of where my comparison of SharePoint to historical EDM (and current ECM) products falls down. SharePoint applications are actually inexpensive enough, and easy enough to manage, that they can be deployed effectively at the departmental and SMB level. SharePoint implementations don't necessarily require huge returns related to high-volume transactional content to be cost justified.

Making headway upstream

That said, there also seems to be evidence that SharePoint can be competitive at the high-end. "We are being considered for implementations in which users are evaluating replacing FileNet systems, on which they are paying high annual maintenance costs, with SharePoint platforms," Bither told DIR. "In those situations, we are being evaluated as part of a best-of-breed approach in which another vendor might be used for production capture and another for BLOB storage."

I also heard at the recent Kofax Transform event that Kofax had been selected to provide capture for a large SharePoint implementation at the investment firm Raymond James. In 2008, Raymond James announced it would be utilizing SharePoint, BlueThread's SmartDesk ECM interface, and K2's BPM technology "to manage massive amounts of data, paper-based content, and business processes that drive new account opening and other operational processes across 2,200 investment offices."

I'm assuming Kofax Capture is being deployed on the front-end of that system in a best-of-breed fashion, which brings us to another question: What is the best approach to adding imaging to SharePoint? There seem to be two options: a Web Parts integration that connects a complete imaging/ECM system to SharePoint and a best-of breed approach that takes a bunch of imaging related pieces and integrates them with the SharePoint platform.

Different ways to skin the cat

To date, KnowledgeLake has been the market leader in document imaging for SharePoint. Although it has a fairly comprehensive set of imaging technologies in its product line, KnowledgeLake falls into the best-of-breed category because, unlike traditional ECM vendors, it leverages the SharePoint repository (instead of managing content in a separate repository connected to SharePoint through Web Parts). In addition, KnowledgeLake has worked with vendors like Nintex and K2 for BPM in the past and at the SharePoint Conference 2009 announced a partnership with Global360.

At first glance, the best-of-breed approach seems attractive because of the single-repository, as well as the ability to pick and choose vendors based on price and functionality specific to a user's needs. A 25-user license of Atalasoft's VizitSP, for example, lists for $4,625. This is considerably less expensive than a full-featured document imaging application that potentially duplicates many of the functions already available in SharePoint—and even more so in SharePoint 2010.

However, there are some challenges associated with the best-of-breed approach. Dan Carmel, CEO of SpringCM, was happy to point out a few. SpringCM is an ECM vendor that delivers its software through an SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform, which can be integrated with SharePoint through Web Parts.

"SharePoint has solid functionality in areas like repository services and collaboration," said Carmel. "But, there are a number of things it doesn't have, which we offer. These include OCR, image integration, advanced workflow, e-signature capabilities, and elements of complex meta data management.

"Numbers from a recent AIIM survey show that half of SharePoint users are utilizing it as a file store. But, if you talk to people on the show floor [at the SharePoint conference], many want to go beyond that. They want to build rich applications on SharePoint.

"They are asking how they can use MOSS or WSS [two current flavors of SharePoint] to automate invoice processing, for example. It's one thing to say SharePoint is storing files, it's another to say it's delivering an ROI.

"How do you get there? Microsoft is not offering a way to do rich ECM strictly through SharePoint. That's why it has partners, and you see a smattering of them on the show floor. Sure, you can use a number of different partners to put together an ECM solution. However, that's just not attractive to a lot of people.

"First of all, the cost can be prohibitive, because not only do all these pieces have to be purchased, they have to be integrated. On top of that, with a piecemeal solution, you are increasing maintenance significantly, in part because all Microsoft partner upgrades are not on the same schedule. This multiplies if you are using different technologies for different instances of SharePoint in your organization, or, even if you have the same technology, but it's deployed and managed separately.

"Many customers today would rather have an out-of-box application they can just plug into SharePoint. SpringCM has pre-integrated 25 different ECM technologies that we offer as a unified single point for building content management applications for multiple instances of SharePoint throughout an enterprise."

The same can probably be said of ECM software vendors like Laserfiche, Hyland, Open Text, and EMC Documentum, which all had presences at the SharePoint conference. However, to get back to what we said before, it's the price tags associated with higher-end out-of-the-box ECM systems and services that have many people considering SharePoint-centric replacements fleshed out with best-of-breed components.

Laserfiche had an interesting promotion at the SharePoint conference—some sort of "Cash-for-Clunkers" marketing campaign. Presumably, Laserfiche was attempting to get users to dump their high-end traditional ECM software for some combination of SharePoint and Laserfiche. This could be a dangerous proposition for traditional high-end ECM players.

You see, while the concept of ECM has always been fabulous—basically content management on every desktop, the reality has been that traditional ECM software has been too high-priced and hard to manage for its use to become truly enterprise-wide. SharePoint's two main selling points are that it's low cost and easy to use.

Yes, there may be some cost associated with building out "rich content applications" in SharePoint, but, when you compare these costs to the costs of maintaining a traditional high-end ECM system, SharePoint starts to look mighty attractive to organizations that already leverage a Microsoft technology stack. However, when you compare SharePoint costs to a lower-end (what has traditionally been classified as a departmental or SMB) imaging application, maybe it's not so compelling anymore, and maybe it's just more efficient to integrate the complete Laserfiche system with SharePoint.

That's why it's my opinion that even though SharePoint started out as a "departmental" system, its true target is the ECM space. That's because ECM, even at the highest level, is still mostly deployed on the departmental level—albeit in some pretty big departments. And guess what? SharePoint 2010 shows that SharePoint is going to be capable of handling some very large content management applications in the future.

Microsoft has built it, when will the users come?

To tie this all back into the document imaging market—yes, I've heard feedback that SharePoint has not taken off like wildfire, like many people predicted, for document imaging. I'll agree with that, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it. Remember, SharePoint really didn't have many good document management features until two years ago, and Microsoft is just now introducing features that make it even more competitive in this area. Let's not forget what the average sales cycle is like in the production imaging/ECM/transactional content management space, not to mention one for what's basically a brand new product. Give it time. As somebody (I'm sorry, I can't remember who, but it was probably more than one person) told me at the conference, people are still figuring out what they're doing with SharePoint, but once they figure out what it can do, it's really going to have an impact on the ECM space.

For more information:

www.mssharepointconference.com

www.atalasoft.com

www.springcm.com

www.laserfiche.com

www.kofax.com

www.documentimagingreport.com/SharePoint.1743.0.htm