SharePoint 2007 limitations for the ECM solutions
Traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions are characterized by number of factors, such as cross-team collaborations and document management. Most of them are aligned with the SharePoint functionality, but unfortunately, in most cases, SharePoint does not prove to be a solution that can meet all of the organization’s ECM requirements.
In this post I'd like to start collecting the scenarios that hits the SharePoint architecture design limits and lack of functionality on the way to meet ECM requirements. If you know more scenarios, please share via comments.
Requirement 1: Large ECM scenarios can require to store millions documents in the single folder or document repository, including deep, nested folding structure to accommodate all of the organization’s documents.
Issue: SharePoint 2007 has limitation of sub-folders support, number of documents stored in list libraries, crawling limitations and etc.
Solution:
- SharePoint 2010 solves such issues, and you can store millions items in folders and subfolders without impact on quering data, rendering and search
- "ECM systems" product, because there is no OOTB support in SharePoint. We can emulate sub-folders using meta-data and customizing views, but nothing helps us to have millions items per library, because performance will degrade drastically on showing thousands documents, not millions.
Requirement 2: Certified state of record management system. Government and military organizations requires the standard and classified record management compliance with U.S. government's DOD 5015.2 certification.
Issue: SharePoint 2007 doesn't support classified records compliance (for DOD 5015.2 Chapter 4).
Solution: "ECM systems" product, because there is only general records support. Chapter 2 via The DOD 5015.2 Resource Kit in SharePoint.
Requirement 3: Sites and document repository need to be classified, encrypted and archived
Issue: List item limitations hinders the capabilities of Record Center feature of MOSS, and no support for reviewing archived content and restoring sites from archive.
Solution: n/a, albeit "OpenText ECM Suite" tool provides some features enhancing search and archiving functionality of Record Center.
Requirement 4: Ability to render, search and manipulate print streams such as AFP, Xerox Metacode formats, PCL
Issue: SharePoint supports rendering the mainstream formants only, such as as PDF, Office documents and etc.
Solution: n/a. Custom solution, based on the print stream converters (Crawford and others)
Requirement 5: Ability to collaborate without bounds
Issue: SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 collaboration is limited to site collections. Albeit SharePoint 2010 provides additional features to Collaboration scenarios, it still can't solve cross-collections collaboration issue.
Solution: n/a due to architectural design, albeit you can use 3rd part components to achive some collaborations [1], [2]
Update: According to Forrester Research, only 18% percent of ECM projects ever make it into full production (a moment to point out the obvious: 82% do NOT reach full production). Mark Diamond published 5 reasons when ECM may never be deployed