Debates on SharePoint at the 2008 RMS conference

I was one of the facilitators at a collaborative session at the 2008 Records Management Society looking at the future of electronic records management.

I asked the group the following question:

which will be more influential by the year 2012:  SharePoint or EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management Systems)?

A minority thought that EDRMS would be more influential because SharePoint does not have full records management functionality.  The majority thought that SharePoint would be more influential.  They thought organisations would implement it regardless of the relative weakness of its records management functionality, because of:

• Microsoft's entrenched relationships with IT departments in most organisations
• Microsoft's willingness to incentivise organisations to take it up by bundling SharePoint up with other products and upgrades
• The fact that SharePoint can do many more things than just manage records and hence will appeal to different interests within the organisation:  even if a records manager rejects SharePoint it may be advocated and procured by their Head of Communications, or a Knowledge Manager or an intranet manager.

Records managers would face two challenges with SharePoint:

• the first challenge would be as a profession, to influence Microsoft to add records management functionality. 
• The second would be to get their own organisations to take seriously the issues of governance and records management within SharePoint implementations.  The group thought this was the stiffer of the two challenges because many SharePoint implementations will be driven from a non-records management agenda. In contrast Steve Bailey thought that the interest other information professionals showed in SharePoint was an advantage to records managers when compared with EDRM which sometimes failed to engage the interest of non-records managers.

There was a debate about the future of EDRM suppliers.  Some felt that their market would be squeezed because many organisations would think that SharePoint, despite its records management weaknesses, did enough for them to get buy without EDRMS.  Others thought that there was a role for EDRMS either plugged into SharePoint, or instead of SharePoint, for orgniasations who wanted stricter RM disciplines than SharePoint supports.  Tony Hendley of Cimtech said that he thought that EDRM suppliers had always had to adapt themselves to the general desktop environments and would evolve products that fitted the SharePoint environment.

On the following day Roger Smethurst presented on DEFRA's implementation of, and customisation of, SharePoint (I've blogged on a similar presentation by Roger here). Roger said Microsoft had shown great interest in the customisations that DEFRA had made to SharePoint for records management purposes.  He had gone over to Seattle at Microsoft's invitation and they had discussed the possibility of incorporating some of them into future releases.

Roger Smethurst said that he was broadly happy with his SharePoint implementation.  The biggest frustration he had was the lack of integration between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.  There is no simple direct way for a colleague to save an e-mail into SharePoint.  Roger ascribes this to the way Microsoft is set up as an organisation. The division of Microsoft responsible for developing Outlook has its own strategy and roadmap, that sits completely seperately from the development of the rest of the Microsoft product range.