ECM: It's A Whole New Ballgame — January Edition: The Value Of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions
By Mike Ball, Clearview Software

2007 has been recorded and archived into our history books. In the technology sector, it was quite a year and no recent activity has generated the relevant phenomenon that Microsoft® SharePoint® has created within the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) segment of the software market. While virtually every ECM vendor with some market presence or name recognition has announced their "integration" with SharePoint, there have been few to adopt SharePoint as a cornerstone of their ECM platform. With SharePoint's rich and deep inventory of ECM functionality designed to meet the business needs of the masses, customers seeking out and evaluating SharePoint-based ECM solutions will clearly become a pervasive business trend in 2008 – and beyond.

One clearly compelling interest in SharePoint for ECM deployments is the perceived attractive cost model. While there is still some confusion about SharePoint being "free" (Windows SharePoint Services is incorporated into the licensing of Windows Server 2008), even the more costly Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) creates a very wide price differential between it and traditional ECM product license costs. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that license is only one part of the total cost of ownership – the services required to create an ECM solution from scratch on top of the SharePoint base platform can be sizable given that it is a platform and not an "out-of-the-box" ECM solution.