I started October with a four part series, The Sharepoint Sessions, based on a local Boston event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Well I am at it again. This time I am sharing my notes from AIIM’s Automating Document-centric Processes – Is SharePoint Enough?” Seminar. I am going to cover four AIIM sessions in individual posts. Each session was led by a Microsoft Sharepoint partner and discussed how their products complemented Sharepoint. In each case I will start with the title and quote the session description before going into my notes. So here goes.

Business Process Management - Extending SharePoint Beyond Collaboration – “Enterprises are grappling with the SharePoint phenomenon. And, while it is a great tool for basic content management, extending it to document- centric business processes like Accounts Payable, Contract Management, logistics etc. can be very expensive and challenging. Attend this presentation to learn how to extend SharePoint and get more out it.”

SpringCM (CM stands for content management) was started in 2005.  It is a cloud based content management system that can be integrated with other tools or standalone. Tim Kanaley of SpringCM mentioned that Sharpeoint is the fastest growing technology ever. It is on millions of desktops but many people do not know what they have. The base price is cheap but extensions can be expensive.  It is good for sharing files. However, vertical applications such as accounts payable are not there because you need integration with other tools and technologies.  So it is not as robust as an enterprise content management tool that has more of these.

Extending Sharepoint to specific business processes can be challenging. You just get the .NET building materials. You need extensive integration services and some more hardware and software if you are going to develop a traditional on-premises solution.

SpringCM believes that the cloud offers a cost effective alternative to all of the above challenges. All the required tools are already integrated so you can shift away from big integration costs. Now you can focus on the business process and move much of implementation to the line of business people. There is drag and drop business process application development for ease of use. SpringCM is designed for SMB and divisions of large organizations. It is created for document centered processes.  The SaaS delivery means that SpringCM can be adopted solely for a specific process. You can more easily measure ROI because the application is tied to a specific process and you can see the effect on this process.  You can also move to outward to integration to other systems. To get back and forth across the firewall you have web services on both sides talking to each other.

The cloud option takes away many of the challenges of the on-premise applications. Integration, upgrades, maintenance are handled by the cloud provider and there is less upfront cost.  You need to have IT vet the platform once and then it can be extended to other areas without new vetting. This wider adoption allows for enterprise wide processes, standards, compliance, etc.

These are all standard SaaS selling features but they also make sense. I have long been a big supporter of work process oriented knowledge and/or document management so this extension ability appeals to me. Getting content management embedded into business processes is where the real ROI lies so Tim’s points resonated well with me.

Tim shared some best practices. First, start with an enterprise wide content management strategy. Then build an inventory of existing content management applications. Next, define the business requirements and technical and functional needs before starting with Sharepoint – don’t just plug it in – and get the business people involved up front. I might switch the order of steps two and three but this still is consistent with what we have been saying about knowledge management for years and still is good practice that is often overlooked.  Next, Tim said to examine the integration points between Sharepoint and the existing content management solutions and determine what needs to be done to get them working together. Finally, establish the governance on when and when not to use Sharepoint. Again, I might move this up and, to be fair, Tim did not explicitly say his list was a sequence.

Tim said that creating formal document centric business processes is a good fit when there is a long-lived document centric process.  It is not a good fit for short-term efforts or small transactions.

To no surprise, Tim recommended a combination of SpringCM and Sharepoint, not one or the other.  He said use Spring CM for business processes and Sharepoint for collaboration. Documents can be in SpringCM (while in workflow) and end up back in Sharepoint. You can also do federated search across both environments.  This was the theme for many sessions at the AIIM event. The ECM vendor said they were recommending working with Sharepoint and did not see it as a competitor. This comes up more explicitly in the next session from EMC Documentum.