SharePoint as an ECM Solution: Forrester Rates Microsoft a ‘Strong Performer’

Forrester's latest assessment of enterprise content management (ECM) vendors paints a picture of a rapidly changing landscape that's being driven both by vendor innovations and user needs.

"ECM project justifications have changed over the past six years from focusing on compliance to improving productivity," reports Forrester in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q3 2013. "Organizations want better ways for their employees to derive value from content and increase the flexibility in the work environment."

As part of its quarterly look at ECM suites, Forrester used 48 criteria to evaluate 13 different offerings, including Microsoft's SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.  For the current offerings evaluated, the key areas of content management assessed broke down into business, transactional, and foundational content. 

According to the research firm, Microsoft continues to hold leadership in business content technologies. The vendor's continued ECM support and enhanced eDiscovery capabilities in SharePoint 2013, for example, qualify Microsoft to stay in a "leader" position for the business area. But the general lack of support for imaging and output management technologies results in Microsoft being a "contender" in the transactional area. "The lack of balance across all technology areas leaves Microsoft in an overall ‘strong performer' position," according to the report.

In SharePoint 2013, Forrester says the capability gap between ECM functions on-premises and in the cloud has narrowed substantially. Record centers are available in the cloud; eDiscovery is available in the cloud; and Microsoft's go-forward strategy is to deliver new capabilities in the cloud first. Following on the heels of this cloud-first strategy is Microsoft's new mobile support for iOS devices.

"Central to its new offerings is cloud-delivered support for Office applications," Forrester reports. "Microsoft's cloud-first strategy for SharePoint and Office ...