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You may have seen that in Office 2010 there are a lot of enhancements for integrating with SharePoint. From the SharePoint web interface you can attach document libraries to Outlook, attach to Office, Sync with Workspace, or open Document Libraries with Windows Explorer.
Like you, I was very excited when I installed Office 2010 Professional Plus on my laptop to start using the tools of the future! Well, I may have been asking for a bit too big of a leap from Microsoft. The reality was not quite as miraculous as the marketing; but to be fair, these tools will be somewhat helpful to a lot of people, and so they are a good start.
From this initial experience and with subsequent research, I realized very quickly that additional tools were going to be needed for anybody who was going to get the best from SharePoint 2010. What is becoming clearer every day is that SharePoint is turning out to be a fantastically powerful platform, and businesses can get a lot from investing in it on a number of levels. However, it takes some key knowledge to take it from a heap of possibilities, and turn it into a powerful production level business tool.
"Moreover, and most importantly, it also forces any 3rd party software that uses the web service to share its limitations. "
To be clear, I am not talking about advanced application building or complex business intelligence gathering (all very possible for sure), but just using it to manage an entire company's shared files. That is something you could do with a shared server drive since Windows NT, so one would think this must be easy in SharePoint. Not really. There are a considerable set of limits that should be studied well before anyone deploys SharePoint to manage important company data.
What you come to realize both from that document, and subsequently from testing, is that the platform itself (with SQL 2008 R2 underneath) is pretty scalable, and very robust. You can confidently build your business systems on the platform within the limits listed, but there are a few caveats. I won't get into the deep dark tech of here, but one the biggest that is going to irritate a lot of companies large and small is the site limit of its Web UI. 2000 subsites is the hard limit per web view, so you can't have a tree view or a site listing that goes that high.
In our dealings with just some small-midsize law firms, this limit was hit in the first public folder migration of just 30 GBs of data, representing just a few years of matters. Construction, insurance, and finance companies are also likely candidates to bump into this wall. It will force the company to radically change architecture, choose a different solution entirely, or pay to develop an interface with SharePoint that does not require this limit.
The web UI depends on the built in web service, which can present itself as a sizeable weak link in the SharePoint solution. Moreover, and most importantly, it also forces any 3rd party software that uses the web service to share its limitations. My general advice is to first look at whether or not your own requirements would cause you to hit this and other barriers. If you can get away with the web UI and it works for your organization then you are in luck. If not, you will either need to re-architect, custom build, or a buy a tool to connect to your tree of sites, lists, and libraries. There are already many of the largest US and international law firms using tools of this kind. I was initially surprised by this until I saw the price of traditional document management systems that law firms and big corporations were using.
Not only were they proprietary, solitary systems, but they were 10-30 times the cost of a SharePoint based solutions. Savings in the millions can be very motivating and the success stories are backing up the decisions made over the last few years by early adopters. It is important to note that not everyone who committed to document management on SharePoint has lived happily ever after. I generally feel that most early adopters get burned and you only hear about the ones who pulled it off. The good news these days is that there are numerous real world models and success stories to draw from. So where does the rich client fit into all this.
With the Microsoft Office connectors, a single document library in SharePoint can be added as a save location for use from Office pro plus, but you have to do that for every document library you want to see, one at a time. Otherwise, you have to save your Word document to the desktop and then upload it after. Let's not forget that using the rich clients (Office applications) does not solve the problems of the web service limitations either. That's not acceptable progress compared to the old way of using file shares.
The other big buzz with using SharePoint is that you can store collaborative email boxes which used to be painfully kept in Exchange in SharePoint. The problem is: how does one gets mail there from an Outlook client? You can mail enable and send mail there, but there are numerous negatives to this that basically make it a non-viable solution. There are lots of articles on this so I will refrain from covering it here.
"In our dealings with just some small-midsize law firms, this limit was hit in the first public folder migration of just 30 GBs of data, representing just a few years of matters. "
So you are stuck having high paid employees put specific email folders in "matter libraries" (for you legal folks out there), or other important central mail libraries. This is a fine method if the process is simple and works every time, but it's not even possible in the native functionality of SharePoint and Outlook. If you attach a library to Outlook from the web UI, you can attach a file from a library, or open the file, but you can't save anything in Outlook to that document library. You can't drag an attachment or an email onto library or folder in SharePoint, or grab a file off of your desktop and drag it in. Unfortunately, it's read only. This makes it utterly useless for someone who has email management requirements.
Based on these shortcomings, several software companies have built tools to improve on this experience. Some are based on the built in web service though they can write to a library, unlike Outlook natively. Others have realized the limits of the web service are too big, so they designed their own purpose-built web service to handle the requirements. Not everyone needs this robust enhancement, but it's likely more and more will need this enterprise class technology if they want to scale effectively without crushing productivity.
Key points:
- SharePoint is pretty amazing and serves as a versatile platform for many key business systems while being affordable, while staying in the versatile/reliable Microsoft Ecosystem.
- Office 2010 offers some new integration with SharePoint 2010, but it's still lacking for some very key business needs, like saving emails and attachments to document libraries.
- People using rich clients like Outlook, Word, and Excel, can productivity by interfacing as effectively as possible with SharePoint.
- There are several products on the market today that can help with the integration of Microsoft Office and SharePoint. The best of them maximize the scalability and performance possible with SharePoint.
- Whether you buy rich client tools or develop them, you will still have a significant cost savings using SharePoint to manage your documents.
Many months were spent reviewing all of the tools and possibilities I could find in the marketplace. I hope my findings are helpful for those seeking answers about rich clients, and document management in SharePoint. Hopefully, it will save you some time. Feel free to contact me if you have an interest in this subject. Otherwise I will see you in the online groups or at the conferences. Good Luck!
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