Is SharePoint a Document Management System?

The answer lies within what you are expecting from the system. It depends on how you choose to define your needs for a document management solution.

At the core, a document management system is designed to automate a business process. In its simplest form, this involves capturing paper documents, or other types of content, so an end user can retrieve the image/content from their computer as efficiently as possible. In practice, executives and end users have a laundry list of needs to be met in order to consider a solution successful:

• Integration with legacy applications (the main system users work from every business day)
• Reports – an audit trail showing who, what and where
• Getting documents to the right people to expedite the business process
• What changes were made to documents after they were entered into the repository?
• What documents are stored in the system?
• Where are the documents stored?
• And certainly – Return on Investment (ROI)

As of this writing, there are more than 200 add-on document management products for SharePoint.  There are products for scanning, records management, taxonomy development, report management, workflow, forms management, and much more.  These solutions are designed to add/provide functionality that’s either not provided in SharePoint, or enhance capabilities that are less than users expect from a native document management solution.Microsoft SharePoint has been a popular topic in the document management field over the past few years.  

There is much debate about whether SharePoint is a “real” document management solution.  What is not debatable is the sky-rocketing growth of SharePoint in today’s organizations.  Some so-called experts point to SharePoint as the fastest product to $1B in sales for Microsoft and the 200 million seats sold.  Truly awesome!  However, we are talking about “digital” document management here – a technology/solution that’s been around for nearly 30 years.  In reference to document management seats for SharePoint; the same experts tell us that less than 9% of all SharePoint users use SharePoint for document management.

This whitepaper is not intended to criticize SharePoint, but to question whether it is a true document management and whether it’s “the right” solution for you.  Let’s take a look at just a few points that must be considered in every document management solution...

Click here to download the whitepaper