Almost half of users of SharePoint say a lack of forward planning and an absence of usage policies are their biggest issues, according to a recent survey completed by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).
Nearly 600 SharePoint users responded to the questionnaire taken in April and May of this year, and more than 60% said they have not yet been able to bring SharePoint in line with the rest of their retention and archive policies.
Further, the survey showed that the need for third-party add-ons to SharePoint for process management, workflow, security, backup and records management is expected to grow to more than three-quarters of SharePoint users.
“Organizations are firstly upgrading to the 2010 version—in many cases putting right previous governance and structural problems—and then looking to expand the content management functions,” said Doug Miles, AIIM’s head of market intelligence.
According to AIIM, many organizations require a more robust repository than the kind that comes with SharePoint to remain in compliance with internal policies or external mandates for storage, retrieval, access and digital signature.
SharePoint users have yet to adopt traditional ECM applications such as scanning, forms processing, document workflow and records management, according to the survey. But based on the responses, users have strong plans to increase their activity in these areas.
“Many are looking to integrate SharePoint, with distributed capture front-end systems and new or existing repositories, to produce a more robust and capable ECM/Records Management infrastructure,” Miles added.
