Enterprise Content Management

Heavily regulated businesses need the support of the kind of enterprise content management solution achievable with Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint, like any other computing platform, offers stakeholders lots of capabilities. But successfully capitalizing on what, otherwise, may be hidden features often requires some work. Enterprise content management (ECM) is an example of one feature set achievable on either an on-premises SharePoint implementation, or even on Office 365. ECM may be a “nice to have” capability for most businesses, and a “mission-critical” foundation plank for any heavily regulated business looking to capitalize on office automation. ECM maintains the position it does with heavily regulated businesses because it is much easier for these businesses to collect, categorize, and report on their…
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One more article on the importance of governance to a healthy SharePoint implementation worth a review

Any enterprise content management (ECM) system (including solutions built on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, on-premises, and/or SharePoint Online, Office 365) should include governance, if it is to be successful. Joe Shepley provides a succinct presentation of the importance of governance in an article titled The SharePoint Information Problem, which was published on the CMSWire website in April of 2014. What I found most helpful about this article is how Shepley connects dysfunctional information management systems built with SharePoint, to what he calls a typical, broader enterprise malaise: “But when you start to dig deeper and ask why organizations have lacked the…
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Be sure to include an ongoing adoption effort in your SharePoint, or SharePoint Online plan

A couple of recently published articles by prominent individuals in the SharePoint community – Chris Riley and Christian Buckley – remind me of an important feature of SharePoint plans more likely to succeed. These plans treat the challenge of user adoption as a chronic condition requiring continuous effort. Riley’s article is Why I Left ECM. The article by Christian Buckley is titled As SharePoint Moves Toward the Cloud, Governance Remains a Priority. While I am at this task, I might as well include a third article, which was published on December 29, 2014, titled ECM isn’t delivering. The common thread…
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Adding External Data to SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online Adds Value to Either Platform

Any plan to implement SharePoint as a legitimate solution for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) needs to address how external data, meaning information usually stored in Line of Business (LoB) silos, will be added to SharePoint and published for user consumption. The rationale for this mandate is simple. A legitimate ECM solution must be capable of exposing any content located within the enterprise, regardless of whether the content is reposed in the ECM, or not. But SharePoint, despite its flexibility, is actually simply one system, of likely many, within any larger organization. If it is to be used as an ECM,…
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Understanding the Role of Taxonomy in a High Value ECM Solution Built on SharePoint

This blog includes a number of posts on the role played by a taxonomy, specific to an organization, in a value proposition for SharePoint 2010 and/or 2013. One can argue a taxonomy must be present to provide a foundation for all of the value delivered by SharePoint components — the Term Store and Managed Metadata Service (MMS) in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution built on SharePoint. Of course this blog is not the only venue for taxonomy proponents to publish their opinion. The AIIM organization publishes a lot of similar content on their web site, for example, Why Create…
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A Realistic Approach to Content Governance with SharePoint 2013

In a post to AIIM’s Expert Blogs titled Enterprise Content Governance 2014: A SharePoint Point of View, Mike Alsup, Senior Vice President at Gimmal Group draws a quick sketch of what I would characterize as a realistic view of the components of a truly useful content governance plan for an ECM effort for a larger community of SharePoint users. Here is a list of some of the important takeaways, as I see it, from Mr. Alsup’s post: SharePoint is now clearly the leading option for most larger user communities with a need for a method of managing a very wide…
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SharePoint has All of the Components of a True Information Governance Platform, But Building a Plan is a First Step to Realize this Benefit

As I’ve written fairly extensively to this blog, SharePoint server, from 2007 to 2013, and even SharePoint Online, Office 365, offers a series of very useful features, out of the box, for either an Enterprise Content Management (ECM), or a Document Management (DM)/Records Management (RM) application. SharePoint-Videos also offers a lot of recently published video training content on ECM, DM and RM. You can review a list of what we offer on our SharePoint Corporate DVD Packages page of our site, and, specifically, in the “SharePoint 2013 Training DVDs” section, which is located directly below our video introduction to our…
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Microsoft Offers an Ample Set of Technical Documentation on SharePoint Managed Metadata Services

SharePoint’s Managed Metadata Service (MMS) is often either ignored by users, or misunderstood. But, as Chris McNulty notes in an article written by Caroline Marwitz, titled Who’s Afraid of SharePoint’s Managed Metadata Service?, which was published back in April of 2013, on the SharePoint Pro website, “[MMS] allows you to classify with precision”. When what you’re classifying amounts to hundreds of gigabytes (and, often enough, terabytes) of data, this capability can deliver substantial savings. So enterprise businesses and comparably sized organizations in the not-for-profit and public sectors should study the service before making a decision on whether it fits a…
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