I was looking for some info on how SharePoint stacked up against Documentum, and came upon Johnny Gee’s article titled Documentum vs SharePoint – Round 2. First I wanted to thank Johnny for a great post and Eric Crone (of ForeFront Partners LLC) for a good comment that greatly expanded the post. I learned a lot about Documentum’s eRoom. However, I saw a few things that were not quite accurate from the SharePoint perspective. This post is my response to some of the points in Johnny’s article and Eric’s comment…

From Johnny Gee’s article:

“Sharepoint (like eRoom) is great for collaboration.  However, once collaboration is done, the information and documents stored in Sharepoint site are siloed from the rest of the enterprise.”

My response:

SharePoint sites are not siloed from the rest of the enterprise. SharePoint has a set of rich, remotable APIs, including SOAP Web services and WebDAV, that allows the rest of the enterprise to interact with SharePoint content. Among other things, SharePoint’s records management API allows an organization to natively use an external records repository with SharePoint, if the organization does not like SharePoint records functionality (now DoD 5015.2 certified).

From Johnny Gee’s article:

“Since these Sharepoint sites are disconnected from the enterprise, there is no OOTB way to have users interact in enterprise business process.  This includes applying corporate retention policies on content.  Another problem with Sharepoint architecture is the reliance of storage of content in SQL Server.  This prevents the moving/archiving Sharepoint sites to 2nd tier (lower cost) storage.”

My response:

SharePoint data can indeed be spread over multiple storage tiers. A SharePoint farm can use any number of SQL Server databases managed by any number of SQL Servers. Administrators have very fine grained control over which database (and storage tier) a SharePoint site collection uses for its content store. This not only allows use of cheaper storage when appropriate, but also allows SharePoint’s storage tier to scale very nicely.

From Eric Crone’s comment:

“Johnny, one of the biggest issues that SharePoint has is administration. I’ve had companies come to us and tell me that they are spending 10 hours a day keeping SharePoint up and running. When you look at eRoom and have customers who have installed it a year ago and don’t have to log into the server again in that period of time, that says alot.”

My response:

SharePoint administration is on par with other enterprise-class server software. Most of my customers do maintenance every few months. As with any server software, excessive maintenance requirements is usually a sign of poor planning or improper initial install and configuration. As they say: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This has been true of all server-class product with which I’ve dealt, not just SharePoint.

From Eric Crone’s comment:

“Some additional key points for eRoom is the ease of extending and building the eRooms by nontechnical business users. A manager can build her own tracking system for just about anything, such as correspondence, without IT involvement. Try doing that with SharePoint.“

My response:

SharePoint is a very good tool for organizations who want to enable their end-users to build their own tools without IT involvement. That’s why more and more organizations are purchasing SharePoint. I am continuously impressed with the types of solutions non-technical users are able to create with SharePoint.

From Eric Crone’s comment:

“Inboxes also don’t exist with SharePoint. But with eRoom, you can add an “inbox” to a room and then start emailing that project, program or business process as you would any member ofthe team. Then, all the related emails to the proejct are in your eRoom, within the context of what you are working on. Stored alongside files, structured and unstructured data.”

My response:

SharePoint does have inboxes. They are called “email-enabled lists” and “email-enabled document libraries”.

From Eric Crone’s comment:

“In SharePoint, you cannot “nest” containers. In eRoom, we can have a folder inside the room. A calendar inside the folder. An event inside the calendar. Another folder inside the event. A database inside the folder. A file attached to a database row inside the database. eRoom will truly go where you need it to go.”

My response:

You can nest containers in SharePoint. Sites can have sub sites. Folders can have sub folders. Events and documents can be promoted to workspace sites that can contain other lists, libraries, and sites. I’ve even created a free tool called List Item Workspaces which will let users easily promote any SharePoint list item to a workspace, like tasks, issues, contacts, etc.

From Eric Crone’s comment:

“Then, there’s the customization side of things. If you can dream it, we can do it as an extension/add-on to eRoom. The API is rich, stable and reliable. As I said, we’re at version 7.3. We’ve built add-ons for numerous purposes including a custom command that will convert the contents of a database row into a fillable PDF form template and uploaded to the attachment area of the database row. We’ve built custom single sign on. We’ve built “relational” databases within eRoom.”

My response:

Microsoft supports 3 levels of user technical capability with SharePoint:

1. Non-technical – These users can do a great deal with SharePoint’s web user interface, including creating sites, lists, libraries, and customizing pages using web parts (the .Net equivalent to portlets)
2. Semi-technical – These users can do even more with SharePoint Designer (a free tool from Microsoft). SharePoint Designer allows semi-technical users to create custom page templates, do graphical database and web service queries, and even create workflows using a wizard interface
3. Technical – These users can do just about anything they can imagine with Visual Studio and the .Net Framework. I know several organizations that have created automated Word and PDF systems similar to Eric’s description using SharePoint. I built one.