Update: I posted my presentation on how multi-file documents can improve SharePoint’s document management capabilities. The presentation discussed not only what multi-file documents can do, but also what it would take to create a multi-file document management implementation for SharePoint. View the presentation here:
This is in response to “How good is SharePoint as Document Management System?” by Toni Frankola. In the post, Toni scored SharePoint’s Document Management (DM) capabilities on a 5-star scale using the following criteria:
- Metadata – 5 stars
- Integration – 3stars
- Capture – 1 star
- Indexing – 5 stars
- Storage – 3 stars
- Retrieval – 3.5 stars
- Security – 3 stars
- Workflow – 4 stars
- Collaboration – 4 stars
- Versioning – 4.5 stars
SharePoint Document Management Needs Multi-file Documents
I liked the post overall and agreed with most of the ratings. However, I would lower SharePoint’s marks for versioning, workflow, and security. The reason is that SharePoint supports only single-file documents. I.e. a logical document is stored as a single file in SharePoint. In order for SharePoint to truly excel as a DM system, SharePoint needs to support multi-file documents. When I say “multi-file” document, I mean something like a compound document or virtual document. Yes, SharePoint Server 2010 has document sets, but they are more like the SharePoint version of Office Briefcase rather than true multi-file documents.
SharePoint’s Single-file Document Limitation
SharePoint’s single-file document limitation manifests itself in these ways:
Versioning: The version information is not very granular. You can only tell when the entire document has changed, but you can not tell which part of the document has changed. For example, your 3-person team is creating a proposal with introduction, technical approach, and pricing sections. The entire proposal has 100 versions over its lifespan. How can you tell when the pricing section was changed without going through each version? The difficulty clearly stems from the fact that SharePoint stores the entire proposal document as a single file. If the proposal were stored as a compound or virtual document with the pricing section as a separate file, it would be very easy to see exactly when the section were changed and by whom independently of the entire proposal’s version history. Let me reiterate that the proposal document is logically a single document not a set of documents grouped together, so it is not quite right to represent the proposal document as a document set.
Workflow: To extend the example of the proposal document, the 3-person team has grown to a 6-person team, with different members focusing on different aspects of the proposal. The proposal is about 400 pages now, and the team has just published a major version. The approval workflow takes a long time, because the approval workflow can only be run at the granularity of the entire proposal document. That means that there are lots of reviewers for each workflow, even when the section in which a particular reviewer is interested has not changed since the last time the approval workflow was run (see above comment on versioning). This means that the reviewer is wasting his/her time needlessly looking over a 400-page document. Additionally since the workflow is running at the scope of the entire 400-page proposal, it is difficult to focus the reviewers’ comments on particular sections or even to make it clear to the reviewers which sections have actually changed since the last review. If each section were a separate file, you could easily run smaller, focused workflows on just the sections that have significant changes, before running one final workflow on the completed proposal.
Security: Extending the example of the proposal even further, let’s say you now have two sub contractors helping to create the proposal. You want the subs to help create portions of the technical approach. However, you do not want either of the subs to see the other’s work as it contains competitive information. Further, you don’t want either of the subs to see the pricing section, since that contains your markup over their rates. There is no way to give each sub contractor access to their proper proposal sections without also granting them access to the entire proposal, as all of the sections are stored in the same file. A content manager could easily secure each section of the proposal individually if the proposal were stored in a multi-file format.
What else can Multi-file Documents Do?
These are just some quick notes. We have a white paper that talks about many usage scenarios made possible with multi-file documents here:
http://www.blackbladeinc.com/en-us/products/docBlock/Pages/UsageScenarios.aspx
Point is. Is SharePoint's cost worth its document management features. There are so many simpler web based document management systems, which cost a fraction.
Simple is good, as long as it is enough. Cost is an important part of assessing any software's suitability as long as the software has the required features and enables the types of usage scenarios required by the users.
Support options, 3rd party support, available labor pool, financial health of the organization maintaining the software are other important considerations when going through a product selection process.
We've been using SharePoing 2010 for the past 6 months and I got to say my staff and I like it.
It's really organized and simple and makes our job easier.
Do you work for these Black Blade guys or something? Lowering SharePoint's rating because it doesn't support multi file documents is ridiculous. If you actually investigated the built in features of Word, you would realize that you can already track specific changes to sections of a document using the features in the 'Review' ribbon, which are fully supported in SharePoint and enhanced through its versioning capability.
Beyond that, each of your scenarios are easily resolved if you thought outside of the box for one second and improved your process. If you are that concerned with working on sections separately, you could simply create a document workspace to share and version the different sections of your proposal in different files, and collate them into a master document at a point in the life cycle when it is appropriate. Just by doing that, you can easily alleviate the versioning, workflow, and permissioning 'issues' you mentioned. This is a solution I came up with in a few seconds, and there are plenty more if you took even a short amount of time to actually THINK.
Do I work for Black Blade? Yes, I thought the very first line of my profile, "I am the CTO of Black Blade Associates…," had made that clear.
The change tracking in Word is fine when you want to compare two close versions of a document, but it is hardly usable as a version tracking mechanism, even in Word 2010. Trying to do so is like moving a pile of sand one grain at a time – ridiculous, it's too granular. Using the current SharePoint versioning capability is like moving the pile of sand once it's been cemented together into a building – not granular enough. Just try making that work with a 1000-page document.
The same issues arise with the security and workflow limitations of single-file documents.
Multi-file documents allow non-technical users (that's important) to easily partition the management of a document into manageable blocks, as small or large as the users' needs dictate for a given situation. These blocks allow the users to control the security, changes, and processes within a document at any level of granularity they want, while using any file format that they want, not just Word.
Can you use SharePoint to implement a multi-file document management system? Obviously. We did. Does SharePoint have the management tools and automation out of the box? No. Without them you'll have a person constantly merging document sections together. How error prone would that be? How much would that cost in salary and wasted time? Think.
I recently did a presentation on this topic to SharePoint Saturday in NH. The presentation discusses the benefits of multi-file documents, how far SharePoint will get you out of the box, and what you will need to create. Check it out:
http://www.blackbladeinc.com/en-us/community/blogs/archive/2011/10/19/advanced-sharepoint-document-management-with-multi-file-documents-sharepoint-saturday-nh.aspx
I posted my presentation on how multi-file documents can improve SharePoint's document management capabilities. The presentation discussed not only what multi-file documents can do, but also what it would take to create a multi-file document management implementation for SharePoint. View the presentation here:
http://www.owcer.com/2011/10/advanced-sharepoint-document-management-with-multi-file-documents-sharepoint-saturday-nh/
I have been using SharePoint for document management for quite a while. I was using SharePoint 2010 before and now has migrated to the new SharePoint 2013 site with http://www.cloudappsportal.com that too free of cost. It offers every feature that makes document management an easy and efficient task for me. Data security is the key to the tool.
Thanks for the post. I'm using RicohDocs document management system and have a very good experience with the same. It has all the benefits and features you list out in this post for sharepoint with other features like OCR and smart workflow.