SharePoint as an ECM Solution

March 2008

 

Enterprise Content Management, or ECM, would be considered a “buzzword” if it weren’t such a very real, critical and problematic gap in most medium sized organizations’ technology and process lineups. Most business functions within an organization have a need for content capture and management. Some companies may have CM without the “E” (that is to say a line of business-specific or departmental solution for content management), but true Enterprise Content Management remains elusive.

 

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines ECM as “the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.” Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides medium sized organizations with a platform for true Enterprise Content Management. Product features that contribute to SharePoint’s ECM credentials include:

• Document management
• Records management
• Web content management
• Forms management
• Common services such as workflow, metadata, repository policies (including expiration settings), search, security, and collaboration

 

Complementing SharePoint’s out of the box capabilities to provide the full suite of ECM services are the document imaging and capture capabilities of products such as KnowledgeLake. KnowledgeLake’s product suite is built exclusively for SharePoint and extends a company’s investment in SharePoint by providing a full set of imaging and capture capabilities required to round out the necessary ECM technology foundation.

 

Following is an overview of the high level tasks that need to be performed to effectively implement ECM using SharePoint and KnowledgeLake:

 

• Identify the business functions and processes that produce documents that will be managed within the ECM environment
• Define the set of document classes to be used (i.e., PO’s, Invoices, contracts, SOP’s, proposals, product documents, marketing documents, etc.)
• Define the requisite document libraries and content types to support the document classes, and the metadata to be associated with each
• Determine the metadata (if any) that can be pulled from existing line of business (LOB) systems or SharePoint data via lookups
• Define the document classes in KnowledgeLake Imaging Server, and in so doing, specify the library, content type, and metadata lookups to be used when indexing a document
• Install and configure KnowledgeLake Capture, KnowledgeLake Connect, and/or KnowledgeLake Scan to support imaging workflow
• Define library views
• Create and deploy any saved searches across the KnowledgeLake taxonomy and SharePoint lists and document libraries with KnowledgeLake Search
• Consider how documents under management should be handled by SharePoint Enterprise Search, and make any necessary changes to search scopes and result pages

 

Most standalone, line of business-specific ECM solutions were built for targeted high volume scan and capture applications and come at a very high cost. SharePoint, with its out of the box ECM capabilities, combined with the imaging and capture capabilities of a product like KnowledgeLake, finally brings ECM to the vast middle market masses.

 

For more information you may click here to download a whitepaper entitled “Leveraging SharePoint in ECM”

 

For more information on KnowledgeLake, please visit their website at www.knowledgelake.com