Are you integrating properly?

By Phil Muncaster
I will stop harping on about SharePoint one of these days. Promise. But probably not until it ceases to become one of the most popular content management tools among enterprises. So you know what I'm going to say next: despite the hype, SharePoint cannot be all things to all people. It isn't a one stop shop for your ECM needs, and if you think it is, you're going to find pretty quickly that the add-on functionality required to make it so will blow your budget through the roof.
 
In the web content management space too, the shadow of SharePoint looms large again. Most WCM vendors - such as RedDot, FatWire and Immediacy - are trying to promote their own product's easy integration with Microsoft's flagship product, again, mainly because SharePoint isn't very good at web publishing itself. And yet, as Tony Byrne of independent analyst CMS Watch explained, it is still well regarded, and very often used in firms for document collaboration. So in many scenarios, it will be necessary for firms to expose those same documents to the web, hence the need for a decent tool to do that.
 
But while the vendors have caught on to this and are trying to differentiate by offering their own forms of integration, a word of caution from the analyst firm: not all integrated products are born equal, some are more integrated than others. These products' connectors vary greatly, said Byrne - some only working with SharePoint lists, some with its libraries too, some are bi-directional, some aren't, the complexity goes on. Why can't things be easier for enterprise buyers? Well, they're not, so it probably pays to do your research as for any other products, and question all vendor claims. Integration? Exactly what do you mean by integration.
 Interestingly, the larger players in the WCM space, Interwoven and Vignette have remained a little more aloof from SharePoint and such integration issues. Perhaps it's because they want to promote their own document collaboration system, as Byrne suggested. In any case, it would seem a brave move to make, considering the popularity of the Microsoft product among, virtually every firm I've come across.