Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 software suite dominated attention at the annual AIIM data management conference and exhibition, held recently in Philadelphia. The rollout of the updated package was accompanied by third-party offerings that add advanced and specialized features to the basic Microsoft package.

SharePoint, as you may know, is a set of programs that allow for collaborative content management. It allows for rapid development of applications (applets) for password-protected data sharing, and includes tools for searching, collaborative editing and version management. What SharePoint does is establish a common, relatively stable basis for customization.

It is becoming clear that SharePoint is becoming not just a set of programs but a true ecosystem, where Microsoft offers the centralized tools and a host of developers worry about all the refinements aimed at specific applications (saving and indexing email, automatic indexing, collaborative markup) and vertical markets (medical, legal, manufacturing). That allows Microsoft’s internal developers to concentrate on improving the core capabilities of the software, while letting other developers worry about the add-ons.

The growing success of SharePoint signals the death knell for proprietary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Until recently, companies that have wanted to manage their documents have had to embark on major and expensive IT projects that had long development times, yet had difficulty adapting to the constant changes demanded by the evolution of business and technology.

A second big factor is the crisis in IT services. In all companies, IT departments are stretched to the breaking point, now more than ever. Just performing help desk and setup services chews up many man hours, not to mention server maintenance, backup, and (most crucial of all) security management. That leaves little time for IT to respond to an (inevitably) growing list of requests for upgrades, extensions, and improvements to current data access. Only the most urgent products get priority treatment, while others languish.

SharePoint, with its customized interface options, allow companies to set up new data management tools quickly, and continue to adapt them to changing requirements, without major time commitments. Now, the IT department will still need to maintain core security and compatibility functions, but once those are in place, it seems that projects for viewing and reviewing data can be developed by non-expert users.

Finally, both in-house data users and customers are more impatient than ever. Most employees now have become expert at digging up info on the Internet, whether through Google or Wikipedia or social networking sites. They can manipulate their own personal data (photos, contact lists, blog feeds) with ease and many can create blogs or photo sites for their family and friends with no deep knowledge of how that data is structured. However, once inside their corporate systems, even the smallest changes seem to take ages.

SharePoint has already started changing that equation in a growing number of companies. Just a mobile phones and now tablets are changing the computing world, so too is SharePoint reworking corporate data management. It’s a good bet that those ECM companies that aren’t agile enough to get on the SharePoint bandwagon will not survive.

Tags: AIIM, SharePoint