Author: Jim Lundy                                                    Date: September 28, 2012

Topics: Content Management, Collaboration               Research Note Number: 2012-32

Issues: How will content management technologies and architectures evolve?

What collaboration technologies and architectures should enterprises leverage?

Summary: Microsoft SharePoint’s popularity means it is often advocated by IT and misunderstood by users. Understanding SharePoint’s many capabilities is the first step towards getting the maximum value from it.

Microsoft SharePoint is over ten years old and coming up on its fifth major release since 2001. Starting out as a document management product, it has shifted to embrace the overlapping categories of content management, portals and collaboration. This research note focuses on the state of SharePoint and what enterprises should do to get a handle on its use.

SharePoint’s success is due to multiple factors. A combination of continued product expansion and an effective freemium seeding program helped fuel its rise. As with any document management or enterprise content management (ECM) tool, user adoption varies, although most enterprises pay Microsoft a client access license (CAL) fee for nearly every potential user.

SharePoint incorporates three product categories: portals, content management and collaboration. Its main use is to manage documents and content, including websites. The number of SharePoint capabilities grows with each version (see Note 1);

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