SharePoint And ECM: Is ''Integration'' Really All You Need For Your Business?

By Mike Ball, Clearview Software

In this edition of my continuing column on the impact of SharePoint on the ECM community, I'd like to focus on what I will refer to as the "integration phenomenon." And what is this? Well, having now been on the road for the past few weeks presenting Clearview's SharePoint-based ECM suite to audiences at the AIIM ECM Spring Solutions Seminar, I have now lost count of the number of legacy ECM vendors who have announced or talk about their "SharePoint integration." This vast sea of companies includes not only ECM suite vendors; they have been recently joined by almost every image capture software company or scanner manufacturer with their "scan to SharePoint" solution. I, for one, would be seriously concerned about our future business if Clearview was only an "image solution" or "scan to SharePoint" solution vendor. While the early pioneers of these technologies enjoyed some exclusivity, it has quickly become a very crowded and non-differentiated vendor landscape. But I'll save the "scan to SharePoint" discussion for our next column.

Based on the volume of "integrations" announced with SharePoint, I thought it might be appropriate and maybe appreciated if I discussed what this means to end user organizations, and help those who are seeking to extend SharePoint into a full ECM platform better understand some of the options that are available in today's ECM vendor landscape.

Why are so many legacy ECM vendors announcing SharePoint "integration"?

This question is actually fairly simple to answer. What else can they do? Of course, I can say this with a little bit of pride in that Clearview saw, anticipated, and planned a next-generation ECM solution suite based on SharePoint. However, as you may very well know by now, SharePoint in many cases replicates some very foundational ECM capabilities like document management functionalities that have been the lifeblood of many document, content, or image-based solution vendors.