Herding SharePoint Content Sheep
November 2, 2008
Microsoft may be pushing Fast Search’s ESP into large SharePoint installations, but certified gold partners continue to find opportunities to make money from the 100 million SharePoint installations. Autonomy and Open Text recently rolled out systems that make it easier to keep control of SharePoint content. Why control SharePoint documents? You will learn quickly enough when you get caught in a legal matter and have to figure out which version of each document is the one that is the “right” one. SharePoint offers primitive and clunky controls for herding SharePoint content sheep; that is, the many bits and pieces of modular documents, emails with attachments, and PowerPoint decks with some relevant information but perhaps not the best and final version of the deck. When you get the invoice for collecting documents manually, you will understand why you have to have robust tools for governing information.
Let’s look briefly at two products that herd content sheep:
First, Autonomy has rolled out Controlpoint. You can read more about the product on the Autonomy Web site here and in the Marketwatch write up here. In a nutshell, you install Controlpoint, and you get policy-driven control of all SharePoint content. Autonomy includes a number of content processing functions with Controlpoint; for example, classification of documents.
Next, Open Text dubs its governance solution the sveltly named Open Text Content Lifecycle Management Services for Microsoft SharePoint, eDOCS Edition. The acronym is OTCLMSMSE. Between you and me Autonomy does a better job naming products. The Open Text solution delivers life cycle management, policies, and archiving functions. A licensee can hook SharePoint into Open Text’s other enterprise content management services as well. You can read CMSWire’s write up here.
Let’s step back and think about SharePoint. Autonomy and Open Text have identified a glaring weakness in the Frankenstein SharePoint. SharePoint is, according to some, Microsoft’s next generation operating system. I think that’s pretty wacky. SharePoint is a product that changes with each release. First it was content management. Then it was collaboration. Now it is knowledge management. The Microsoft sale pitch makes SharePoint seem easy, cheap, wonderful, and the cure for what ails a modern organization. In reality, SharePoint lacks the chops to deal with content when a lawyer shows up to collect information as part of the discovery process. SharePoint doesn’t do any single function particularly well. What it does is deliver stub functions that work okay when you have two or three people using a small number of documents. Increase the number of documents and the number of users, and you have a multi million dollar investment to get the system stable and running with acceptable performance.
I am willing to go out on a limb and say that Microsoft will introduce enhanced policy and information governance features. The Microsoft certified professionals will install these extensions, and the company will find that liberal injections of money and technical resources will be needed to get the amalgamation working in an acceptable way.
In the meantime, Autonomy and Open Text should be able to make sales. When Microsoft rolls out its own governance solutions, engineers at these companies will develop a fix for another void in SharePoint.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2008
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