28 Jun 2010
Firms are losing business-critical information contained in Microsoft SharePoint sites, according to research firm Ovum's research director Tim Jennings.
Jennings said two customer surveys of European IT decision-makers showed that firms were deploying SharePoint for business collaboration without any forethought about information governance around the technology.
Further reading
HP information management expert Erik Moller said: "SharePoint is one of Microsoft's product successes, with customers implementing the solution because of the collaboration boost it provides to firms."
"SharePoint sites are easy to set up, but when the project ends, business-critical information is stuck in these sites," he added.
Getting IT to dig out that information will not be high on their list of priorities, because staff will be working on other projects by then."
Jennings also indicated similar problems with consolidating legacy applications.
"When legacy applications are retired, or consolidated [by rolling out applications which combine functions of legacy applications], firms still need access to the business-critical information that was in the original legacy software," he said.
Users have never been, and never will be, disciplined enough to manage information properly. Put all the policies in place you like, they won't help. There is a reason Sharepoint is designed to provide a Record Centre as the backing store.
Posted by: David 'dex' Schwartz 22 Jul 2010
Seriously, why would you blame the technology for a company's poor information management? Are they trying to say that information lost in file shares, or other document management systems is better off. It's just another case of organisations thinking that the enabler ? SharePoint ? is the solution, when it's a platform. Learn how to use it!
Posted by: Andrew Fix 29 Jun 2010
Yes, a lack of governance around SharePoint will lead to problems. Actually, I'm currently working on a Site Closure Policy governance research report. It would be great if interested readers could take the survey ... so we can figure out what organizations are doing to solve this potential problem. See http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/siteclosurepolicy.
Posted by: Mich 29 Jun 2010
Is this article serious?
Since when is SharePoint the black hole of business critical information? In what scenario are the creators/users of the content in sites just removed completely after a project ends?
What business/company does this, and why would they in the first place?
Have they ever heard of archiving? Data retrieval? Historical document preservation?
Seems to me like the people who complained on this dont really know what the heck they're doing in the first place.
Posted by: John 28 Jun 2010
The article reminds me of tabloid press headlining a biased perspective, with the rational response appearing a few days later buried in the adverts for SharePoint Governance tools. Pure hype.
As with other record and knowledge systems, the corporate body quickly realise the need to extend KIM governance to SharePoint content, to include training about what different site types are to be used for, and manage the archiving or records centre/management policy accordingly. Legislation kicks hard if these policies are not in place and implemented.
Posted by: Mike Bunyan 28 Jun 2010
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