Are You Getting Schooled on SharePoint?
For those of you in the “copier dealer” channel (although I’m loath to use this term) you are probably wrestling with the realities of Document Management Systems (DMS). In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM.
In this article John outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Being in the business of documents, I found the article compelling. Not surprisingly, taking the number 1 spot was the momentum SharePoint is garnering. John goes on to say:
1. The entry of Microsoft SharePoint as a serious player in the document and records infrastructure marketplace. This is one of the most important developments in evangelizing these technologies that we have ever seen. Suppliers and consultants will debate what MOSS can do and what it can’t. But it won’t matter; it will spread like kudzu through the end user community.
John could not be more dead on with this. With the advent of SharePoint 3.0, whether it be the enterprise or SMB offering, Microsoft has taken root in the document space. We use it daily for both an Intranet solution as well as for dashboarding and workflow. Microsoft has once again bundled a core offering into the OS; since it is free to get started, meets some entry needs for the SMB, and is extremely compatible with the predominant desktop OS and Office suites it is indeed “spread[ing] like kudzu” (John must’ve been to South Carolina recently)!
While this solution is great for “evangelizing” the DMS/CMS market, I have quickly discovered it is not a very good DMS solution. Don’t mistake the fact that it has some wonderful collaborative tools and is extremely solid in ad hoc workflow solutions. However, SharePoint offerings are not true DMS’s in and of themselves.
Education is a tough thing here because many people don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to store a document within a database, as part of the SQL table record. It took me seeing what happens when you hit your first 20,000 documents stored - or worse have a client hit 3,000,000 pages 3 years early!
The performance takes a huge hit, and backups are a nightmare simply because you are handling 1 huge file instead of incrementally dealing with each file as needed. Think about your entire customer base calling you on Monday morning demanding a service call! You’re service team would crumble.
In closing, SharePoint will give your dealership the opportunity to talk to more customers about DMS, but if you don’t get there first and have an education strategy for them - you are the one that will get schooled.
My suggestion is to partner or acquire talent that can bring SharePoint knowledge into your company. It’s a technology that has its place - so you can either learn to use it to your advantage or see how much longer selling copiers with Paperport will last…
Tomorrow we discuss the entry of “alternative” delivery systems… what does that even mean?
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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April 26, 2008 at 11:32 pm
[...] my March article, Are You Getting Schooled on SharePoint?, John Mancini, president of AIIM, went on to [...]