Sharepoint as an Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Question

I work for a large organization and we have been utilizing SharePoint for document library. Yesterday my boss called me to his office and asked me:

"I heard that SharePoint is an ECM! So what can it do for us?".

"What kind of problem do you want us to solve utilizing SharePoint?", I replied.

"I want to know what it means when they say it is a ECM and how it can help us?", He said.

I told him it has Document Management, WorkFlow, Records Management, Search and some other stuff.

Anywho, He wants me to put togetter a list of things that SharePoint offers as an ECM.

Answer 1

You might find some useful info on the MS ECM team's blog.

Answer 2

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server has a substantial content management system available. What was previously Microsoft Content Management Server was discontinued and that functionality was put under the Sharepoint umbrella. Usually this is referring to web content, but it can honestly be any kind of content relevant to an enterprise. It is intended to be a direct competitor to all the major WCMS out there, focused especially on the enterprise (governance, auditing, security model, etc).

That having been said, the current iteration of MOSS's EWCM pretty much blows. If you can develop your CM strategy to be parallel to MOSS, it can work out OK, otherwise it's much more pain than it's worth. Use SP for document management and use something else for content management.

Answer 3

Sharepoint is a collaboration platform restricted to a windows environment

Give Alfresco communities (labs) a go is my opinion here as it 'acts' as a Sharepoint server so Microsoft Office suite will not notice the difference but your wallet will...

Answer 4

Er... think the boss got a bit too much $$$ to spend. But really, an't we supposed to deploy a technical solution to solve a business problem.

The list of features can be found at

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/product/capabilities/Pages/default.aspx