In your experience how does SharePoint as a back-end Document Management Solution (archiving included) stands compared to other proprietary document management systems. Is it any comparison analysis out there?
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A:
SharePoint 2007 excels at being a document management solution because of it's tight integration with Office 2007. From inside of Word/PPT/Excel you can save, check out, check in, add custom fields to your SharePoint list, etc. Your non-technical users will get it pretty quickly. It can also be very nice for letting your super users create and manage their own department portals.
Things it doesn't excel at: Being an application platform.
Jim
2009-07-05 18:45:09
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A:
I agree that it is a poor application platform. The database contains tables that are basically textfield1, textfield2, numericfield1, numericfield2, numericfield3...Blecch. The API is opaque. The web-facing server product is expensive. At my current employer, we considered Sharepoint, but dropped it in favor of an ASP.NET solution, since we only needed rudimentary document management capabilities.
Robert Harvey
2009-07-05 18:49:13
The database isn't queryable at all, not only because this isn't supported by MS, but because you can't rely on field values being located in certain columns. You have to use the API to get reliable results.
Alex Angas
2009-07-06 08:18:54
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A:
One of the major benefits, if it is an internal application, and you can mange with Windows Sharepoint Services, is it's "free".
As an application platform Sharepoint development can be less productive than ASP.net, depending upon what you are doing.
You can however combined the two. Build your UI in ASP.Net, then call Sharepoint functionality via web services when you need it.
Shiraz Bhaiji
2009-07-05 18:57:07
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A:
One of Sharepoints main features is document management. In my opinion, its Document Management features and its lackings:
Great metadata, integration only with msft tools, no built in functionality to capture paper docs, strong indexing, uses SQLServer as storage platform but lacks on serious document archiving, not great search and filtering, item level security, decent work flow capabilities, strong on versioning and collaboration.
Erich
2009-07-11 23:59:24