Get More From SharePoint

by Lowell Rapaport

Microsoft SharePoint solves this problem by combining a document management system and document search tools with a Web portal. No separate database or Web servers are needed, and there is just one interface for users to deal with. SharePoint, however, does have its limitations.

"SharePoint can be used out of the box, but it lacks specialized high-level functions," says Gartner research director Karen Shegda. "It has limited scalability, only a very simple workflow infrastructure and limited functionality needed for vertical markets. It can be customized, however."

Enter Elite Information Systems. This Los Angeles-based company specializes in time and billing software for professional practices and consulting firms, but it recently added a robust combined document management system and Web portal built on SharePoint. The product, Elite Encompass, complements and bolsters Microsoft's technology with an enhanced interface and higher-level features required in many deployments.

Among the enhancements built into Encompass are Smart Props and Deal Room features, folder policies, offline support and file-level security. The Smart Props feature allows Encompass to load document properties from independent ODBC databases. The metadata values can be loaded automatically, or users can manually enter information from pull-down menus. Deal Room lets external users securely log into the document management system. When users create documents, they can choose to keep the document private or publish it with varying levels of security, including an option for access to users outside the company firewall.

Encompass's folder policies define the physical location on a system where a document is saved. Encompass administrators can determine where files are stored according to predefined criteria, ensuring that files will be available to priority users even if the document management system goes down. This feature can also be used to force files to be saved to special kinds of storage such as DVD or magneto-optical.

Offline support lets users check out a document and work with it offline. File-level security addresses one of SharePoint's major shortcomings: It only provides folder-level security. While documents within a folder in SharePoint have to be shared or protected as a group, Encompass lets users share or protect individual files.

Elite has also integrated time, billing and financial applications for practice management, which are available optionally. Application integration was added to bring increased functionality to the SharePoint environment. "The integration goes even deeper than at the portal's top level," says Tom Bartley, Elite's vice president of strategy. "Information freely passes between the document management system and our other applications, giving users a fully integrated environment."

At Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe and Nichols, a 200-employee law firm in Los Angeles, Encompass has introduced a major change in the way documents are managed.

"Prior to using Encompass, we stored files on our network using a carefully designed file naming convention," says Jeff Moffat, the firm's chief operating officer. "Most users stuck to the system fairly well, and we would lose files only occasionally. But losing any file is unacceptable."

There were other problems with the law firm's ad hoc approach. "We had no way to share or reuse documents," Moffat explains. "Collaboration on the system was almost nonexistent."

Moffat says his firm chose the software "because we had a long-standing relationship with Elite and because of Encompass's Web capabilities." The law firm was a long-time user of Elite's billing and finance management products, and Moffat says he liked the way those products could be integrated with the Digital Dashboard portal included in Encompass. Moffat adds that Smart Props will "take a lot of the pain" out of the switch to a document management environment by reducing the amount of manual data entry needed to index documents.

Input from Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe and Nichols during beta testing led to some important additions to Encompass. For example, the product originally supported only Microsoft Office desktop applications. But because WordPerfect is the dominant word processor among lawyers, the law firm prompted Elite to support its favored word processing tool.

Integration with productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and WordPerfect requires that Encompass still have one backward-looking software component: a dedicated client. While other file types can be searched and downloaded through Encompass, viewing and editing requires the native application. Saving back to the document management system requires Encompass thick-client software that integrates a custom Save dialog box into Office applications and WordPerfect.

A modern, Web-aware document management system should either use a Java applet or ActiveX control that can be dynamically downloaded to integrate with local applications or use a thin client running within a Web browser.

"Although there is a long-term trend toward thin clients in document management, thick clients are still required by many document management systems," says Shegda of Gartner.

Shegda also expressed concerns about the Microsoft technology underlying Encompass. "SharePoint is limited in its ability to scale up and has relatively primitive workflow," she says. The workflow is built on email messaging. "... Encompass will likely only be sold into small- and mid-sized companies and departments within larger companies."

At $295 per seat, plus the cost of the required SharePoint Server (about $72 per seat), this product's best play may be for small- to mid-size professional services firms that can also take advantage of Elite's optional but well-integrated time and billing applications. Lower-priced competitors include 80-20 Software, which has an Exchange-based document management system ($119 per seat, plus $6,375 to $9,500 per server CPU) with a new SharePoint connector.

SharePoint offers a basic management, search and collaborative infrastructure that will be a building block for more complex content and document management systems. Elite is among the first third-party vendors to release a complete product based on this platform. We expect refinements and competitive price pressures to make such offerings increasingly attractive.