SharePoint 2010: This Year's Core ECM

Each year, as we enter the month of January and companies contemplate their quarterly objectives, analysts take a look at their respective fields and make some predictions for the upcoming months.  This year, one analyst — Joe Shepley of CMS Wire — has made an important prediction when it comes to enterprise content management.

Specifically, Shepley says that 2011 will be the year that SharePoint 2010 becomes the core ECM resource on the market.  The reason is that SharePoint 2010 now overlaps more of the features of "traditional ECM," while also integrating features that are important in the present-day market, such as social site resources.  There are now very few resources in other ECM utilities that the current version of SharePoint doesn't cover, and most of those resources (e.g., those found in Oracle) can easily be viewed as complimentary services.

Of course, the greater need for information organization is also a big part of why this new version is SharePoint is likely to become core in the upcoming months.  In addition to the fact that more organizations rely on their knowledge-workers, knowledge-workers themselves are showing a greater push for content management resources.

Shepley reminds users that SharePoint 2010 doesn't work well as a standalone ECM right out of the box; rather, enterprise-class users need to invest in important customization and add-on features (plug-ins, web parts, customized infographs, etc.) to make the system work ideally at this large of a scale.  That's one of the reasons that SharePoint consulting is so crucial: it helps you figure out exactly what you need to add, integrate, or change, and companies like ours can also help you in actual customization as well.


2011 should be the year that brings companies out of the dark ages, as various organizations update from legacy ECMs, decide that it's high time to implement their first CMS, or vie for SharePoint due to its broader collection of solutions.