The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Capture and Imaging | Sharepoint and Office 365
Microsoft SharePoint is sweeping through organizations, serving as a powerful catalyst for the benefits of enterprise content management (ECM), which include not just managing content, but also collaboration and process automation. In some cases, it has pushed companies to seriously consider leveraging SharePoint as the first step towards ECM. For other companies, it has been more about how SharePoint needs to coexist with current systems. While SharePoint has brought ECM to the masses in a simple and easy-to-deploy way, one question that looms large is: How do I get my paper into SharePoint so that I can transform it from a liability into an immediate business advantage? To answer that question requires careful consideration of the eight key points outlined here.
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1. Business Connectivity Services. The Business Connectivity Services (BCS) used to be called the Business Data Catalog (BDC). It provides access to your external data sources such as databases, external business systems, and web services. Using BCS, External Content Types can be created that allow read/write access back to the external data sources. External lists, which operate much like normal lists, can be created in SharePoint from these External Content Types so you can have access to these external systems right inside of SharePoint. Client applications such as Office or third party applications can also connect to the external data source using the ECT without writing any proprietary code. There is also an offline caching mechanism to enable offline access to External Content Types.
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Making an ECM implementation successful requires planning and attention to detail. The best way to create the right solution is to identify organizational goals and priorities. Learn how to manage a successful implementation in our free guide.
Capture and Imaging | Document Management | Sharepoint and Office 365
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Before consulting on any SharePoint project, a little detective work on the IT department can really pay off. One reason for this is that SharePoint has a reputation for being a "disruptive" technology. Let's deconstruct what this term means with respect to IT office politics before getting to the wrecking strategy detailed below. First, we must acknowledge that SharePoint doesn't really fit any of the standard categories used to manage IT applications. It's not an ECM system in the sense of being exclusively focused on that function alone, though it can be used to manage content. It's not a search engine, though it can search across many types of content. It manages web content, but it manages lots of other content too. And finally, the straw that we always grasp at, it's a "collaboration" platform, which is fuzziness itself when bean counters try to measure its ROI.
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Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | Sharepoint and Office 365
With the release of SharePoint 2010 in beta and the anticipated production release sometime in the first half of 2010 (one source says it will be released late in Q1, but that’s a full-blown rumor, so don’t hold me to that), it is time to provide an update on the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s collaboration/content management/business intelligence/portal/ECM/records management tool. In an earlier post, I listed Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System, and, at first glance, the new version looks very encouraging from an ECM perspective. As I’ve said before, I get excited by anything that can help my clients better manage their information, and SharePoint has the potential to be a transformative platform bridging structured content, unstructured content, and social computing in one flexible package. SharePoint 2007 does a decent job of this, but it has some deficiencies when it comes to managing all content in the enterprise.
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