While the case for taking an enterprise view of data capture into Microsoft SharePoint is persuasive, actually implementing the strategy is more challenging. In the US and Europe alone more than 20 million tons of office paper is produced and consumed every year.

The use of paper remains pervasive across many industries, resulting in high administrative overhead costs and too many points of failure as documents are routed throughout the organization. The cost to file a single paper document is $20, while searching for a misfiled document costs $120 and reproducing a lost document is estimated to cost $220. The total cost of printing, copying, storing and mailing is 10 times the original purchase price of the paper itself. Despite these costs, a recent survey by AIIM showed less than 30% of SharePoint users are managing scanned documents in
SharePoint. Those that are scanning documents to SharePoint are doing simple ad-hoc scanning, capturing single documents for storage in SharePoint. They are not performing scan to process, capturing documents at the point of origination, and entering them directly into the business process with minimal manual intervention.

To fully leverage SharePoint, organizations need to capture both electronic and paper based information in an automated, “touchless” fashion. Yet, despite the demonstrable benefits of integrating all information — whether paper or electronic — into ongoing business processes and eliminating paper from those processes, the existing systems, methods and mindsets are typically so entrenched that capture automation is difficult to achieve. This paper will explain the value of capture enabled business process management (BPM) with SharePoint.

SharePoint has become one of Microsoft’s fastest selling products of all time. Initially promoted in its 2003 release, the 2007 update has propelled SharePoint into nearly two thirds of the AIIM community, and the 2010 release looks likely to add further momentum. SharePoint has created a new collaboration paradigm, encouraging many new users, and fuelling innovative add-on applications.

However, the rapid adoption rate for SharePoint has created confusion in many organizations regarding their future strategy for information management, particularly those with existing and established ECM (Enterprise Content Management), RM (Records Management) and BPM (Business Process Management) systems. Many new users consider SharePoint to be an IT infrastructure project and have little experience of document and information management. Even for experienced users and consultants, the openness and breadth of the product raise a number of critical governance issues. Meanwhile, vendors across the ECM spectrum have rushed to integrate their products with SharePoint in order to add value or plug potential functionality gaps.

In this report, we look more closely at the impact SharePoint is having, both for existing ECM-suite users and for those choosing SharePoint to be their first ECM system. Features and functions are changing fast, so planning and policy setting are vital. In this report, we measure the experiences of users so far, and highlight their options for the future.

SharePoint has evolved from a somewhat lowly position to become the Swiss army knife of corporate IT departments, promising collaboration, team and project management, electronic content management (ECM), intranets and portals, records management, and more – straight out-of-the-box, and with over 70% of organizations having deployed SharePoint in some form, it appears to be here to stay.
However, whilst a Swiss army knife is useful because it has many different tools, none of those would

However, whilst a Swiss army knife is useful because it has many different tools, none of those would normally be the tool of choice for a professional in any single area: opening a bottle of wine with the mini corkscrew might be fine once in a while, but a sommelier opening 30 bottles a day would use a piece of equipment built for much more frequent and rigorous use – stronger, easier to operate and more reliable.

So does SharePoint resemble the Swiss army knife? Good if you want to do a bit of collaboration here and there or a quick and easy intranet, but not quite robust enough for daily usage or enterprise-wide deployment? Or is SharePoint the rightful choice as the multi-disciplined IT tool for today’s organization?

Many would argue that the sheer volume of 3rd party add-ons highlight that SharePoint is nothing more than a Swiss army knife: a platform that requires users to plug-in “industry-strength” tools from external suppliers in order to achieve the performance, functionality and robustness required.

In this report we explore these questions, collectively described as “the SharePoint puzzle”. We look at why organizations selected SharePoint in the first place, how it has performed against expectations, which parts of SharePoint businesses are using for ECM, collaboration, social, and business process management (BPM), and where gaps have been identified. We explore how organizations are adding these missing pieces with SharePoint add-ons, 3rd party extensions and cloud services. Finally we look at spend predictions for SharePoint-related software and services in the coming 12 months.