SharePoint: pros and cons

Sorry to bang on about content management again, I do have better things to do with my time, honestly. It's just that a bit of news caught my eye again at the tail end of last week. A lot of noise is made by commentators about the impact of SharePoint on the industry. You certainly can't talk about content management, or ECM, these days without mentioning Microsoft's disruptive product, but you certainly can talk until the cows come home about whether it's a full ECM solution or not.
Usability has often been talked about as the secret of SharePoint's success; users love it and IT has to just deal with it. But there are other reasons. John Powell, chief executive of open source ECM vendor Alfresco, told me it was more about the distribution mechanism - being hooked into Office you might say has given SP an unfair advantage. Love it or hate it though, and most users seem to love it, SharePoint has certainly raised the profile of ECM in the enterprise.
The perception therefore has been that SharePoint's gain has been its rivals' loss, especially in the mid-market space where it has really made hay. But the latest findings from analyst firm CMS Watch reported that the ECM market is thriving more than ever before...actually more that most other areas of IT.
The truth is that SharePoint has spread the content management gospel, educating users that, yes, they probably could do with some tools to mange their content actually. Far from buying the vendor line that SP can be all things to all people, buyers are beginning to understand that they will need to look elsewhere for certain capabilities SharePoint can't provide, such as imaging and capture, said lead analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe.
So, judging by the report, the prospects fort IT buyers are pretty good. Prices are coming down, choice is increasing and firms are beginning to fill the gaps in the market. It's obviously more complex than that, but generally speaking it's not a bad time to be looking at re-evaluating your ECM systems, as many vendors are now offering integrate with SharePoint, so for example, you can keep your highly usable SP front-end, but take advantage of more enterprise capabilities provided by other vendors underneath.