SharePoint: Too much of a good thing?
- TAGS:collaboration, content, documents, Microsoft, SharePoint
- IT TOPICS:Enterprise Apps, Government & Regulation, Management, Windows
Analyst firm CMS Watch (specializing in content management technologies) says Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007 is spreading like an uncontrolled weed throughout companies.
For example:
- A North American bank reported more than 5,000 uncontrolled and unaudited instances of SharePoint
- A major energy company reported finding more than 15,000 previously undetected instances of SharePoint
"On the one hand, this is testimony to its well-deserved popularity for simple document collaboration, but it also leads to serious management problems that Microsoft itself can’t adequately address today," says CMS Watch principal & lead analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe, in a statement.
So what's the problem, exactly? The chaotic proliferation of SharePoint silos means a lot of duplicate, unmanaged content that could be a risk for regulatory compliance, archiving and e-discovery.
The irony is that IT departments often encourage end users and departments to install SharePoint, because the end users can do it themselves without IT involvement. Only later does IT realize that it needs "to invest in developing genuine ECM [enterprise content management] strategies to bring some order to this chaos," says Pelz-Sharpe.
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Related:
Review: SharePoint Server eases collaboration
Opinion: Is Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 a golden app?
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