SharePoint Engineering ECM

Enterprises strategically choose for SharePoint
It looks like Microsoft SharePoint has finally made it into the strategic enterprise content management space. Many enterprises have appreciated SharePoint as a comprehensive platform integrating core document management capabilities with a wealth of collaboration and social media tooling.

In addition, due its growing market dominance, a massive SharePoint ecosystem of third party point solutions and extensions has established itself.

But can SharePoint therefore match the EPC and AEC document management and control requirements? The answer is NO, not by itself and neither by the ecosystem.

Slowly but gradually also native SharePoint enterprise class applications have entered the market and provide SharePoint that final push in claiming its position as the market leading ECM vendor. Cadac Organice is one of the best examples of such an application. Starting back in 2002 with SharePoint 2001 and now far over 100 man-years of development later, Cadac Organice has been successfully focused on providing enterprise class engineering document management and control applications on top of SharePoint.

Why choosing SharePoint as ECM platform?
Why did Cadac Group choose SharePoint as the underlying ECM platform for its Cadac Organice solution portfolio, i.e. what added value is SharePoint delivering to our clients?

• A first key answer is user adoption. In today´s world it will be hard to find ´non-Microsoft-literate´ users. With SharePoint, but also Cadac Group fully adopting the well-known Microsoft ´look & feel´, users will relatively easy adopt to its user experience. This is increasingly important given the highly divers character of users in asset related projects. More than 60 percent of the Cadac Organice users never had any formal training, nevertheless the adoption is relatively high, both for our client´s internal- as well as external users.
• Although the Cadac Organice applications are NO plug & play type of things, compared to some well-known Documentum or FileNet examples, they at least ´feel like´ it. Because of the highly structured and user friendly configuration options, implementing SharePoint/Cadac Organice is not a rocket science. In addition, a Cadac Organice implementation, which very much looks like a cultural thing in the SharePoint world, does not include any hard-coded customization.
• Last-but-not-least we would like to address the Cost-of-Ownership. Over the past 5-10 years it has become clear that from system operations up to application maintenance and support, the cost-of-ownership for SharePoint based solutions is significantly lower than for non-SharePoint based ones, simply because it fits within the existing Microsoft infrastructure environment and please, name us one customer for whom that´s new land?

And the expectation for Cadac Group? Looking at our actual pipeline, we expect that the 2013 record high will be easily topped in 2014.