The next version of Microsoft's fastest-selling server product, SharePoint 2010, came out in beta just a couple of weeks ago. I've been testing it with a focus on its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities, and I'm impressed.

What is ECM?

ECM is one of those terms that everyone defines differently. According to Gartner Group, it is a set of technologies that performs six functions:

• Document management.
• Web-content management.
• Records management.
• Document-centric collaboration.
• Workflow.
• Document Imaging.

SharePoint 2010 provides all of these except document imaging, and even there it can be augmented to meet the requirement, since nearly all document-imaging vendors are working hard to integrate with SharePoint.

The Competitive Landscape

Gartner puts Microsoft in a virtual tie for first place with IBM in its ECM quadrant. The other "leaders" are EMC, Open Text and Oracle. Considering that this ranking was based on SharePoint 2007, and given the improvements in SharePoint 2010, Microsoft is clearly in a good competitive position.

But SharePoint is a relative newcomer to the ECM world, in comparison to such stalwarts as EMC Documentum, IBM Filenet and Open Text eDocs. So how does it stack up in terms of functionality? Here are my impressions of the beta version:

• Document-centric Collaboration -This is the traditional, core strength of SharePoint, going back almost a decade. The new Office Web Applications provide the ability to create, edit and share documents "in the cloud," and with enhanced social networking capabilities, increases the transparency and efficiency of collaboration. None of the other solutions do either of these things.
• Document Management -The ability to define hierarchical taxonomies, and publish and enforce them throughout the enterprise, put SharePoint's capabilities on a par with its competitors. But advanced functionality, such as role-based virtual folders and drag & drop document profiling, are still missing. And scalability remains a question mark with SharePoint 2010. Significant tweaking is required to enable storage of data beyond about a terabyte, although the ability to extract the content from SQL to a remote commodity storage solution offers some hope for this area.
• Workflow -Microsoft has added enhanced workflow portability, and much richer codeless workflow capabilities. In my opinion, Microsoft's offering is now the best available on a feature-comparison basis (assuming that the bugs that plagued workflows prior to SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1 do not reappear).
• Records Management-Microsoft's records management feature in SharePoint 2007 was little more than a web service to interface with other ECM systems. In 2010, it has blossomed into a robust solution in its own right, with multi-stage retention rules, and search-based legal holds. The document-routing functionality (now called the Content Organizer) is also greatly improved, allowing for the implementation of enterprise file plans-although it doesn't provide the intelligent content-based routing offered by some others.
• Web-content management -Content deployment, authoring and web standards compliance were a disappointment out of the gate in SharePoint 2007, and despite some improvements at the margins, they remain generally too difficult to use today. SharePoint 2010 promises some improvements that are very technical and which I haven't tested, so from my perspective, the jury is still out.

Is SharePoint 2010 ECM Ready for Prime Time?

All in all, SharePoint 2010 is a marked improvement over 2007 as an ECM solution.

The biggest advantage it probably brings from a strategic perspective is that it is a single unified platform for five of the six ECM functions.

Microsoft's biggest competitors, IBM and EMC, both have bigger suites of ECM solutions that best Microsoft in areas like scalability and advanced document profiling; but they generally also have much higher integration and support costs.

So unless you need massive scale or automated content-based document profiling and routing, it's worth taking a close look at SharePoint 2010.

And you have some time to think about it; SharePoint 2010 won't come out of beta until mid-year.

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