Forrester SharePoint Research Notes

Notes on Microsoft’s 2007 Enterprise Content Management Platform
By Kyle Mcnabb

MOSS provides a single environment for collaborative document management, Web content management, records management, workflow, and eForms support

MOSS now supports defining content based on its type — such as contract, deal, article, or customer presentation which facilitates more discrete management

Document Management supports Check and Check out (standard and enterprise?)

MOSS now includes serial and parallel document review and approval workflow support.

Administrators can create new workflows using Office SharePoint Designer 2007, and developers can use Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows Workflow Foundation to create new workflows.

MOSS integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 client applications such as Outlook and Word. Document libraries can be natively accessed through the Outlook client. Employees can subscribe to document libraries, and they can get notified of changes to documents via RSS feeds and email alerts through Outlook. Furthermore, SharePoint documents and folders connected to Outlook can be synchronized with local desktops for offline access and editing

Per user price points for basic document management have hovered between $50 and $100 for the past 18 months. Moss offers basic document management abilities plus a host of additional features at that cost.

Troubles with MOSS stated in this document are not of much concern for us:

• No federated policy management support across SharePoint libraries.
• Not an issue now, nor a requested feature
• MS forces customers to migrate, not simply upgrade, existing implementations.
• MOSS 2007 implementation should work for us for years to come
• No digital asset management support(such as video).
• Teams dealing with this have their own systems in place
• Some value-added capabilities are only available with full Office upgrade.
• We intend to upgrade
• Very little support for transactional content processes. Lack robust Business Process Management (BPM) support
• Could be enhanced with supporting products