SharePoint Again!

SharePoint is a huge success story for Microsoft. No other product from their stack in recent history had evoked such overwhelming responses from users worldwide. It solves the problem it was created to solve exceptionally well. Move content away from shared folders. Along come the cool collaboration features – shared document libraries, calendars, meeting sites, tasks, announcements, workflows etc. etc. WSS by itself gives an organization enough features to build a highly collaborative Intranet. And that too for free!

Upgrade to MOSS and you get browser based InfoPath forms, advanced search capabilities, IRM (Information Rights Management), Records Management Analytics and far too many more features. To be honest, the list is comparable to any leading ECM/BPM product out there. It is a salesman’s delight. It ticks at least as much features as a FileNet or a Documentum in an ECM/BPM questionnaire. And it costs way lower than what an IBM or EMC would quote for a similar set of requirements. Great stuff!

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. SharePoint thrives in a very simplistic world. One can build a simple form based workflow in minutes with SharePoint and InfoPath. The catch here is that the workflow has to be simple (I mean very simple) and linear. What one need to do is to build a simple form template in InfoPath and publish to a document/form library in SharePoint and create a workflow using SharePoint Designer (This is also free!)

But real life is not that simple. If one has to build an expense approval workflow that resembles reality, life gets complicated (I mean very complicated). Let us look at a sample scenario like the one below:
- User fills an expense report form
- Attaches supporting documents
- On submit of the form, it is sent to the user’s manager for approval
- The manager updates some of the form information, adds/modifies the attachments, and approves/rejects the form with comments

To make the solution easier, let us assume that MOSS and InfoPath are used. Even then, to create the workflow one needs good amount of SharePoint and InfoPath programming knowledge. As far as I know, you can’t get this done without writing .Net code or using third party components.

One of the issues that the programmer would stumble upon is with attachments. InfoPath forms embed the attachment files inside the form making them inaccessible to SharePoint workflows. So, some amount of InfoPath code has to be written to extract the attachments and save them to SharePoint document libraries. The workflow has to be created with Visual Studio by a programmer and not with SharePoint Designer by an analyst since custom programming is involved. The other major issue is creating workflow tasks for the user’s manager. Finding the user’s manager from Active Directory will need some code effort. And the most important of them all, propagating the form information to the workflow task would require abundant amounts of thoughts, patience, and creativity. Only expert programmers can handle it.

So, it is not easy to implement a very simple real life scenario in SharePoint. But it is not impossible. Using SharePoint for ECM/BPM needs will require skilled implementers. That’s all! Let us hope that Microsoft will make SharePoint 2010 a better ECM/BPM platform.