Could SharePoint simply be 'good enough?'

At the EMC Writer's Conference last Friday in New York City, Bryant Duhon, an editor at AIIM's Infonomics magazine gave a presentation on Microsoft SharePoint. Many participants engaged in a lively discussion, which concluded that while SharePoint wasn't the best solution out there, "it is good enough" for most organizations' requirements.

Duhon pointed out that it may be a good choice for many IT departments because it's cheap and often free. It is also familiar because it is a Microsoft product, even if it's not the best technology available. Whitney Tidmarsh, CMO for the Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC, pointed out that SharePoint was never going to be a complete ECM solution, but it brings ECM to the desktop level. She sees value in that, because it puts the idea of content management in front of end users.

The fact that it's fairly easy for end users to understand and deploy is a strength on one hand, but it can also result in literally thousands of SharePoint sites across the enterprise, raising a huge, governance red flag.

At the conference, Annette Weller-Collison, a senior consultant at Kahn Consulting, a firm that advises companies on risk and compliance issues, pointed out that these sites are spread out all over the place and companies have no idea what they have. If such a company were issued an eDiscovery request, it would have no idea how many sites it had or what content could be lurking inside them. She says companies need to start paying attention because there are huge compliance and findability issues around maintaining so many sites.

SharePoint is impossible for companies like EMC to ignore (as I wrote in SharePoint's hard to define, but you can't ignore Microsoft as an ECM Player). Their presence across the enterprise is undeniable, but the question remains whether SharePoint provides a complete ECM solution or one that is simply "good enough" for most operations. Either way, Microsoft is clearly winning the numbers game.

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