SharePoint as a replacement for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems?

I read an interesting (albeit not too surprising) article by Alan Pelz-Sharpe from CMS Watch entitled "Three continents, one SharePoint story" which claims that customers are not looking at SharePoint as a direct replacement for their ECM systems. His global research suggests that in the main customers are delineating between SharePoint as a collaboration tool and SharePoint as a true enterprise content management system. While I agree with Alan in general I have a few random thoughts...

• In the past, when I spoke to customers about SharePoint and Documentum integrations I used to always hear the question - "Why do I need both?". I'd agree that I am almost never asked that question anymore so maybe customers now have a better understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the solutions.
• One thing that bothers me in Alan's assessment is that he is talking to existing ECM customers which skews the results IMHO.
• Existing ECM customers have an investment in their ECM solution of choice - the cost of moving existing content and processes may be a major factor in maintaining both systems. He mentions this in his 'rip and replace' comments.
• Existing ECM customers tend to be medium-large companies - I wonder what the results would be if the same question was asked of smaller companies.
• I think that just because companies are not dumping their ECM systems doesn't mean that SharePoint is not being used for ECM alongside those formal ECM solutions. Many customers with whom I speak are doing uncontrolled, informal, collaborative content management in SharePoint and then want the documents to 'move' over in to the ECM system at a certain point in their lifecycles.

Of course the real point here is that SharePoint may not really provide good enough ECM capabilities today but what's to come? I still struggle to see how SharePoint could support some of the mandatory ECM-related functionality with their current architecture but it would be naive to think that Microsoft would not go after that space in future releases.

If anyone from Microsoft would like to tell us the 5 year strategy for SharePoint I promise that I'll keep it a secret. Just post it here as a comment.

Comments

[Mark L]

... that SharePoint may not really provide good enough ECM capabilities today... It depends on what you use your ECMS for. If all you need to do is store documents (the definition of a CMS to all but ECM professionals) SharePoint is a great ECMS. A related story in CMSWire - Gartner places SharePoint in the ECM magic quadrant. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/sharepoint-in-leaders-magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-cms-003221.php

[Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog]

Microsoft's Five Year Plan for SharePoint

Andrew Chapman is thinking about SharePoint as a replacement for ECM : Of course the real point here

[Lou Franco]

I'm interested in hearing what some of the mandatory ECM functionality you think isn't supported by SharePoint's architecture. I am mostly looking at the front-end of ECM, where SharePoint either does well or is easily extended. Are you talking about repository-level (archiving, scalability) or is there something more?

[Andrew Chapman]

Todd,I need to tread lightly here because it becomes easy for this to start to sound like a "my ECM system can beat up your ECM system" competition and I try (but probably fail) to not take a directly competitive stance. I think that I serve my readers better if I try to take an agnostic position although it is sullied by the fact that I’ve been around ECM systems for 12 years now, (I started in 5th grade), and am very opinionated.
That said, I don't think that it is any secret that the traditional ECM systems do have more functionality and that their solutions typically scale/perform better. When I talk to customers their concerns are typically primarily focused on security of the data, management of the repositories, scalability, longevity of the environment, etc. but they also bring up missing functionality.
ECM systems are like any software; 80% of the users use only 5% of the functionality. You could live your entire ECM-related life without ever needing to have document renditions or lifecycles; OOTB SharePoint workflow might well be everything that you need; you might not need to manage non-Microsoft content, highly structured XML, terabyte files or high-volume transactional content. So, the real question for customers is whether they need all/any of this…the question is whether “good enough” is good enough – if it is then go for it. See my latest posting for some commentary around that exact topic.
Andrew

[usa content management system cms]

Thanks for sharing– I’m new to this and there seems to be a boat load of information available