Last Updated on February 22, 2023 tania
We believe SharePoint with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is the most powerful and complete Content Services Platform (CSP) on the market. However, in a recent report, Gartner highlighted the gaps in SharePoint which it goes on to say third-party independent software vendors (or ISVs) need to fill for enterprises to have a complete solution for information capture, collaboration, workflows and document management.
“SharePoint provides strong capabilities in some areas, such as architecture and integration and library services, but has weak or missing capabilities in other areas, such as capture, records management, and workflow and process.” – Gartner
According to Gartner, while SharePoint with Office 365 scores weakest in the required criteria of capture (22%), a little better for the required criteria of document management 69%, and most poorly at meeting required criteria for records management (51%). This isn’t the first time Gartner has called out the need for content service add-ons to support SharePoint for digital business. In 2019 we did another blog talking about how Gartner assessed SharePoint and its limits.
Why is there urgency for enterprises to fill the SharePoint gaps?
The capture gap and document management gaps equate to lost worker productivity as workers spend time searching for files that colleagues did not save or share. That time spent in frustration looking for information often equates to wasted costs.
The records management gap can equate to legal risk as documents that represent a risk are retained, or documents needed for legal defense are hard to find or lost. There’s further risk on the compliance front as documents meant to be kept private are mishandled and shared or leaked violating data compliance, or documents required to demonstrate adherence to regulations are lost.
In a report from June 2020, Gartner recommended that application technical professionals evaluating SharePoint should “take control of [their] documents by implementing the platform’s information governance, metadata and classification features. These features have enough functionality to provide a significant improvement over using only file shares or leaving SharePoint ungoverned… use third-party products to augment Office 365’s capabilities if you have advanced capture or records management needs and want to meet them using SharePoint”.
“Organizations with complex records management requirements or more than ad hoc capture requirements must purchase a third-party product to address SharePoint’s weaknesses.” – Gartner
Work from home forced the rapid transition to cloud-based platforms and has caused content sprawl to become a much bigger problem. Knowledge and records managers everywhere are scrambling to bring organization to the data chaos. Similarly, IT professionals are seeking to take advantage of the power of SharePoint and metadata to help workers find information fast even working remote.
Achieving effective content capture with SharePoint
Capture is an integral part of knowledge management. Content needs to be saved and filed to the appropriate libraries and sites, and properly tagged as it comes into the system. With the onset of ever-growing document sprawl; SharePoint’s capture capabilities have historically been limited.
When enterprises have Office 365 add-ins for content capture, workers can easily capture and tag emails or documents with metadata so they are easy to find when needed later, shared with co-workers and protected securely as corporate knowledge. Effective capture delivers meaningful costs savings through more efficient workflows, time efficient legal discovery and supporting data compliance.
Capture and collaboration solutions like Colligo Email Manager for Microsoft 365 and Colligo Content Manager for Microsoft 365 help close the SharePoint capture gap for departments like the finance, legal or human resources by working the way workers want to work. Using Colligo email capture and document capture tools, users can stay in the Microsoft 365 applications they use most and save files to SharePoint from there – adding metadata as they go – and without losing productivity in the flow of work.
As McKinsey has discussed, metadata remains a central component of a comprehensive records management strategy; not only for compliance purposes, but also to save time for workers.
McKinsey estimates that knowledge workers spend 20% of time searching for files and documents.
Addressing records management requirements with SharePoint
Records management is continually becoming a more central piece of the information governance pie.
Gartner points out that, as a record management system, SharePoint is not considered to be enterprise-class; “retention labels and retention policies only provide basic classification, records management and archiving functionality”.
There are some early-adopters of cloud-based comprehensive records management systems and strategies out there but we observe that overall adoption is still low. We foresee many organizations especially government, law firms and organizations overseeing multi-million projects like construction, will seek to ramp up records management in the coming year and beyond – and seek ways to conveniently capture, classify and records with retention labels and sensitivity labels for better data governance.
If requirements for your organization include multi-stage retention schedules, guaranteed immediate disposition, physical records management, or additional out-of-the-box certifications, consider a more modern records management strategy that includes the necessary third-party applications. At Colligo, we work with several partners to deliver a comprehensive and more complete solution, including RecordPoint and Gimmal.
SharePoint is still the best Content Services Provider on the market
At Colligo, we are proud to extend the value SharePoint and Microsoft 365 to bolster user productivity across an enterprise and support information management and records management goals.
We continue to stand strong in believing Microsoft SharePoint is currently the most comprehensive CSP on the market both in terms of breadth and depth.
The Microsoft 365 platform allows the enterprise to unlock the power of information, and utilize it in ways that drive value for every worker. We continue to aim to extend the value and capabilities of the Microsoft platform and believe the combination is extremely powerful for the mid-sized to large enterprise.
Want to learn more about Colligo solutions to extend SharePoint’s power? Let us give you a tour.
