Many organisations acquire Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to manage all their organisational knowledge: documents, wiki, web. As such it serves as a cheaper alternative to the top of the line enterprise content management products. It’s certainly cheaper to implement if you just run it as out-of-the-box as possible.

It also addresses the widespread issue of how you manage version control of documents that then need to be published directly to a website, which is why so many mid to upper tier web content management vendors provide SharePoint “connectors”: Morello and Tridion are good examples.

You need to take care before asserting that SharePoint is true ECM, however. It offers practically no document automation, no business process modelling and poor integration to other applications, particularly if they’re not Microsoft based. What you get from SharePoint is a collaborative document repository that offers you pretty limited web publishing capabilities. You wouldn’t want to use it to drive a busy transactional website.

You also need to look at your website’s publishing model before considering SharePoint in any context. The SharePoint – WCM model is best suited to a very devolved authoring group publishing what’s essentially extranet-type content. If you’re publishing marketing copy, you need a specialist team of copy writers and a centralised platform for publication.

SharePoint is undoubtedly cheaper than implementing true ECM, but you get what you pay for. Before you buy, make sure that:

• You only want to integrate with other Microsoft software packages.
• Your audience will relate to content being produced by a wide group of authors.
• You require minimal automation of business process through the website.