Recap of EMC Event: Getting More out of Your SharePoint Investment

I was in Long Beach last week at an EMC luncheon where I presented on how organizations can get more out of SharePoint. A good percentage of the people who attended stated that they are using SharePoint today in some way, which should not come as a surprise.

Consider these interesting data points:

• 71%  of organizations are committed or will consider SharePoint for their business (source: IDC 2009)
• 67% of those responding to an AIIM survey stated they needed to either customize or buy third-party products to allow SharePoint to meet their needs (source: AIIM Market Intelligence Report on SharePoint 2010)

The SharePoint customer journey can be looked at in three phases – initial deployment, broad adoption, and business solutions.   While standing up a SharePoint site (or a collection of sites) and allowing people to add content and collaborate sounds like a good plan, you need to have a well-defined plan that covers the users, processes, and the technologies needed to ensure success.

At the EMC luncheon I talked about four key ways you can get more from your SharePoint investment while setting yourself up for success. I’ve summarized those four key topics below.

Upcoming SharePoint Lunch Event: 4 Ways to Get More from Your Microsoft SharePoint Investment

Is your business using SharePoint today?  There is a strong possibility your organization is already using SharePoint or is planning to in the near future.

IT beware: SharePoint 2010 is a good way for collaborating and gets high marks for being easy to deploy. But IT and the business users need to be aware that there are some inherent limitations in SharePoint 2010 that need to be considered when looking at how you get your information into SharePoint, how your users are best served when accessing and using it, and finally how to assert governance around the information being stored in SharePoint. 

I’ll be presenting at an upcoming lunch event in Long Beach, CA on December 6th (details below) on the SharePoint topic, and you learn about four key ways to:

• Speed the delivery of paper-based information and records into SharePoint
• Provide direct access to the EMC Documentum repository from within the familiar SharePoint interface
• Automate business processes which rely on the content and collaboration managed by SharePoint
• Enable secure access to active and inactive SharePoint content – while supporting regulatory and corporate requirements

Register for event >>

Location
L’Opera
101 Pine Avenue
Long Beach, California 90802

Date and Time
Tuesday December 6, 2011
11:30am – 1:30pm

We look forward to seeing you at the event.

Why Choose EMC Captiva to Get Your Paper into SharePoint

It is likely your company is either using SharePoint today in some way or is considering using it in the very near future. Regardless of your current situation or plans, one of the requirements you may have is converting paper into digital information and storing the content in SharePoint.

Now scanning and imaging has been around for years, so this not a new concept. But before you make an investment into a capture product, there are four key requirements you should consider. In an upcoming Webcast, I’ll be discussing those four key requirements and why companies should choose EMC Captiva to get their paper into SharePoint.

To register for this upcoming Webcast on November 17th, go to the following link and register.

Webcast: Why Choose EMC Captiva to Get Your Paper into SharePoint

What you will learn during this 30 minute Webcast is why basic scanning and imaging is not going to give you the return on investment that is possible without an intelligent enterprise capture solution from EMC. To borrow a quote from the recent Enterprise Strategy Group white paper:  “The Strategic Value of Information Capture”

“The question is not whether an information capture solution will provide an ROI; it’s how big it will be. It is very easy to try and maximize this return by buying the least expensive solution on the marketplace, but this can often limit many of the measurable and intangible benefits. In contrast, an organization that purchases an integrated, feature-rich information capture solution—complete with imaging, indexing, and routing capabilities—will have more opportunities to derive more value, boosting the overall return on a slightly greater investment.” 

 

New Paper on Capture for SharePoint

A new white paper from Harvey Spencer Associates on Capture for SharePoint 2010 is available – Intelligent Enterprise Capture: A Document On-Ramp to SharePoint 2010.

The paper reviews some of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and how intelligent enterprise capture connected with SharePoint can support the automation of paper based processes in both departmental and large-scale distributed enterprise applications.

#1 Article on ECM Connections: “Getting Paper Into SharePoint: Five Key Things To Consider”

If there is one conversation that has caught like wild-fire in the past  18 months, it has to be capture for SharePoint. Case in point, an article recently authored by EMC and available on ECM Connections is the #1 downloaded article. You can check it out here – Getting Paper Into SharePoint: Five Key Things To Consider

ECM Connections Top 10 Articles

In many ways Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has brought ECM to the masses in a simple and easy-to-deploy way, but let’s not jump to conclusions and think SharePoint has everything you need.  SharePoint 2010 provides a foundation for ECM, but it is missing quite a few ECM puzzle pieces – archiving and library services, business process management, transactional content management, scanning and capture, and physical records management. Some or all these may be important to an organization looking to use SharePoint. One could also debate whether or not all the capabilities needed to support document management, records management, human centric workflow, and other key ECM functions are there. We can debate those other areas another time.

Upcoming Webcast: Intelligent Enterprise Capture for SharePoint 2010

Here’s a Webcast where you can learn more about the Captiva intelligent enterprise capture solutions and SharePoint 2010. EMC and Microsoft will be co-presenting on this Webcast, and it is a great opportunity to hear how companies can leverage capture in their SharePoint environment to drive down costs, improve process efficiency, and gain better control of their information.

To register for the event, click here.

Extending Your SharePoint Environment

Today, EMC announced the latest round of solutions that enable customers to further leverage and extend their Microsoft SharePoint environments. The latest solutions bridge the gap between Documentum and SharePoint for content control and an integrated user experience, EMC SourceOne eDiscovery for direct management of SharePoint repositories to conduct legal discovery searches and execute legal holds within the repository, and finally EMC Captiva for capturing and delivering information into SharePoint. With this latest round up of solutions, EMC provides customers several ways to extend their SharePoint environments to meet their content management requirements. For the latest release, you can go here:

www.emc.com/about/news/press/2009/20091019-01.htm.

Intelligent Capture, More Than Just Scanning

Document capture is not a new concept, but using capture with SharePoint might not be something all organizations have considered. SharePoint has typically been more around collaboration and not seen so much as a document management system. The key to know is scanning software and intelligent capture, are not one of the same. Yes, it is all about turning paper into digital information but that is just the basics.

Simple scanning applications are designed to turn a piece of paper into digital content and allow users to manually index a couple fields so that it can be properly indexed in a SharePoint repository. Now that may be good enough for some, but what the EMC Captiva for SharePoint solution can provide is real automation. By that I mean automatically identifying document (no pre-sorting), recognizing the data, validations like database lookups and pre-fill of fields, and finally delivering the captured information into a SharePoint Server. This is important in the case where capture volumes warrant ways to automate manual task like indexing, or the variety of documents being captured need to be intelligently identified and logically grouped before exporting into SharePoint.

Doing more with Information Captured

Information captured from a document is certainly used to index a document in SharePoint, but there is more you can do with EMC Captiva and SharePoint.  For example, Captiva is often used for line of business applications where the data and documents drive a particular process. Accounts payable, claims, and loan processing are just a few examples. In that type of application the data being captured can be exported as XML and integrated with Microsoft InfoPath forms that are part of a review and approval process. Once in SharePoint, users can open an InfoPath form that contains the data captured and exported from Captiva, along with the image. Simple routing and approval of these forms can take place from within SharePoint.

Controlling and Accessing Content

For those companies who would like to use Documentum and SharePoint together getting the benefits of both worlds, EMC Documentum Repository Services for SharePoint can automatically redirect content normally destined for SharePoint Server’s Microsoft SQL Server repository and send it to a Documentum repository for content aggregation and compliance with zero impact on end-users. What this means is that it addresses operational issues by reducing the amount of content destined for SQL Server, addresses compliance issues by storing SharePoint content in a single repository of record allowing for common policy enforcement across systems, and lastly supports the re-purposing and re-use of content stored in the Documentum repository.

Now you’re likely wondering, do my users have different user experiences now that I’m using Documentum and SharePoint together? The answer is the user experience is absolutely seamless.  EMC My Documentum for Microsoft SharePoint provides direct access to the Documentum Content Server natively through the SharePoint user interface. That means content that is stored in Documentum can be accessed via a SharePoint Web Part and can include Documentum functionality like document lifecycles and renditions, as well as Documentum advanced search capabilities. Companies who want to use SharePoint and need it to integrate with their corporate Documentum ECM backbone will find this latest set of solutions the right fit.

A Need to Discover

One final solution EMC announced is EMC SourceOne eDiscovery for SharePoint. This solution comes from EMC’s acquisition of Kazeon, and provides direct management of SharePoint repositories to conduct legal discovery searches, execute legal holds within the repository and deliver robust repository analysis and review capabilities.

With SharePoint server deployments being used across an enterprise, you probably see where utilizing this type of index and collection of content could be a powerful tool when there is a need to analyze and review specific content pertinent to a specific case or investigation.

What Next?

If you plan to attend the Microsoft SharePoint conference this week, I encourage you to stop by the EMC booth and take a look at the latest set of solutions. See for yourself the commitment EMC and Microsoft are making to deepen product interoperability in the area of enterprise content management (ECM).

Got Paper? Get It into SharePoint with Automated Document Capture

I finished up a recent Webcast on capturing paper documents, digitizing the content,  and getting the information into SharePoint.  If you are looking to learn more about the EMC Captiva intelligent capture products and how they work with SharePoint, then you’ll want to listen to this Webcast recording. 

Click here to access the recording on EMC.com.

Enjoy!