With more than $1billion in sales and more than 65% of organizations implementing SharePoint 2007 within six months (Microsoft Leads A Fragmented, Growing Content Management Market, June 22 2009, Forrester), SharePoint is moving toward ubiquity.
Many organizations (including my own) use SharePoint for document management and portals. Organizations whose enterprise agreements with Microsoft include large SharePoint licenses are now looking to see how they can leverage their investment in SharePoint beyond simple document management. And Microsoft is eager to drive that deployment in order to grow SharePoint’s footprint.
In the Network World article “SharePoint Solutions: Smart Investments in a Recession” http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/39057, Susan Hanley lists three reasons to invest in SharePoint during hard economic times. The number one reason is around business process automation.
“Solutions that automate business processes, especially those processes that are designed to replace lost workers, can help organizations deliver value with fewer resources. If an organization already owns SharePoint (and we all know that many do), building an automation solution on the SharePoint platform may be easier to justify than an expensive investment in business process automation software.”
I see the potential of Business Process Automation and the potential of SharePoint. However, I also know that SharePoint is a platform; it’s not a Business Process Management (BPM) solution. In order to manage complex processes, custom programming is required, making the initial deployment and maintenance costly. I’ve spent the last several months exploring how to help organizations take advantage of their SharePoint investment in a way that delivers better time to value and enables them to maintain business processes themselves, without costly consultants.
My starting point was that business rule technology can help streamline complex processes. However, I knew that there was a layer of process automation capabilities that was needed to extend SharePoint’s core capabilities. ShareVis www.sharevis.com is software that builds upon SharePoint to automate document and forms management. InRule Technology has partnered with ShareVis to extend and enhance SharePoint to automate complex processes without custom programming.