SharePoint 2010 Steps Up to the ECM Plate

SharePoint 2010 Steps Up to the ECM Plate: "SharePoint 2010 Steps Up to the ECM Plate"

26 February 2010
Mark R. Gilbert, Karen M. Shegda

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00172077


Microsoft evolves SharePoint in the 2010 release to include richer content management functionality. Gartner expects it to compete increasingly in the traditional high-end content management market.

Overview

Microsoft has announced details of its much anticipated next release of SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, which provides improvements in scalability, content management functionality and governance. Application developers, IT planners and enterprise architects will want to assess the changes and plan their strategy for adoption or migration.

Key Findings

- SharePoint 2010 remains a horizontal content management offering. Microsoft does not appear to be targeting vertical applications or transactional (fixed) content management with this release, but rather more collaborative processes and dynamic content applications.
- This release promises improved scalability and better support for broad enterprise deployments.
- Enterprises will be better able to govern their SharePoint deployments if new features, such as policy-based information management, prove robust and effective.
- SharePoint 2010 provides a more intuitive user interface. The range of information workers who can consume and use content management therefore continues to increase, blurring more completely the distinction between user and administrator.

Recommendations

- Existing SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services [WSS] or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server [MOSS] 2007) customers should plan for eventual migration to SharePoint 2010, although the time frame will vary based on enterprise needs and risk aversion.
- Unless enterprises have pressing needs, Gartner recommends waiting until the first service pack for SharePoint 2010 is released.
- Organizations looking to SharePoint to support large volumes of static content or transactional processes will find their needs better met through partner-built solutions extending SharePoint or competing enterprise content management (ECM) offerings.
- Understand the broader investments you may need to make for SharePoint 2010, as it will be available only with a 64-bit architecture and will require other Microsoft components.
- Test third-party applications/Web Parts that may need to be integrated for compatibility.


Analysis


Microsoft's SharePoint family has been a widely successful offering with organizations of all sizes and across all industries. Gartner inquiry and survey data indicates that approximately 50% of organizations, both large and small, have piloted or deployed WSS or MOSS 2007 as key elements of their overall information infrastructures. By delivering a broad set of functionality using a horizontal infrastructure approach, as opposed to the traditional application approach, Microsoft has changed the way organizations think about content management and collaboration — they are no longer distinct arenas. Yet, SharePoint has not been without its challenges. Through client interactions, Gartner has collected a great deal of information about the 2007 version's limitations in supporting more advanced ECM requirements. These include server replication issues, inability to support compound documents, and limited process management capabilities. SharePoint is currently best used for supporting ad hoc content management needs and collaborative content processes. (Social software issues may present additional challenges.)

Though MOSS 2007's "sweet spot" is as a portal and also for document-centric collaboration and basic content management, many organizations have pushed the boundaries with it and view it as a strategic platform on which they want to build composite content applications (see Note 1). Thus, the most often asked question from Gartner clients has been: "When will SharePoint be a full ECM system?" As Microsoft prepares to ship this fourth iteration of SharePoint, IT professionals and business leaders want to know: "Has Microsoft finally got it right?" In many ways, the answer is "Yes." Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (expected release 1H10) will offer significant improvements in many areas that have been problematic in MOSS 2007 and it will close the gap with its ECM competitors, particularly with regard to document and records management, metadata management and policy-based governance. Some ECM vendors will increasingly find themselves competing against, rather than coexisting with, SharePoint 2010.

With this release, Microsoft has focused on making SharePoint 2010 both enterprise- and people-ready. It addresses interrelated capabilities for search, social computing and ECM. However, it still does not meet some high-end needs, such as synchronization between server farms, out-of-the-box integration with other leading content management systems, and a clearly defined flexible repository and storage strategy other than SQL. Users needing these functions will require third-party tools from vendors such as Infonic, Syntergy, BlueThread Technologies, Systemware and StorSimple.