By Greg Chalmers, Business Development Executive for Quality Associates and DocPoint Solutions

The amount of content an organization must manage is growing at an incredible rate. The cost associated with managing content, not surprisingly, grows as the amount of content increases and regulatory compliance standards tighten. Corporations have ever increasing requirements to easily and quickly store, manage and retrieve enterprise content to solve business problems ranging from customer satisfaction to disaster recovery.

Fortunately, organizations are discovering that a solution to these challenges may already be on their computers. That solution is Microsoft SharePoint, which according to Microsoft is software that enables collaboration and improves content management, business process implementation, and access to information across the organization.

Sharing work files through email is a cumbersome process. SharePoint eases collaboration by allowing files to be stored in one location and enabling access by all team members. Today’s work occurs across multiple locations, whether it is in different countries, around the nation, and across departments. SharePoint enables teams and individuals to connect and collaborate together, regardless of where they are located.

By combining the use of metadata with full-text search capabilities, SharePoint enables fast, accurate location of relevant documents. SharePoint can index text documents located in other SharePoint libraries, on file-servers, on Web sites, and in other vendors’ document management systems. Since the actual content is held by the source system, access will be limited by the site's availability and the individual's rights to access the information.

In typical Microsoft fashion, SharePoint has continued to evolve from a sturdy but not highly functional platform to a very functional platform that addresses a wide range of ECM requirements. Most impressive, of course, is the installed base of SharePoint licenses--some 17,000 companies have purchased 85 million licenses. These companies are now determined to leverage their investment as much as they can—for Web content management, for document management, and for ECM. And where there are ECM requirements beyond the SharePoint platform itself, Microsoft has in place a long list of partner solution providers. One ECM feature that SharePoint does not have is in the document capture area. A third-party solution must be used to provide this feature.

SharePoint integrates basic Document Management (DM) functionality with Microsoft Office products to enable the creation, review, and publishing of documents to an intranet, the Web, or an extranet. SharePoint enables users to manage a document through a core set of services -- including check-in, check-out, versioning, and document profiling throughout the document lifecycle. Security and access can be strictly controlled during the document creation process. After a draft document is complete, users can then create a workflow approval process to ensure compliance with predefined requirements.

Microsoft SharePoint basically enables users to boost the efficiency of certain business processes, making it possible to do more with less.