SharePoint Integration: A Commodity?

So, if you're in most parts of Life Sciences, you have probably heard a little bit of the buzz that Microsoft SharePoint has generated. SharePoint is being touted as a viable competitor to EMC Documentum, and although that transition is still to be proven, it is being looked at strongly by small and medium business who have not yet selected a document management system. SharePoint enters a competitive market, and our friends at the Laszlo letter have some thoughts on this issue.

With that in mind, many companies are examining their eCTD creation and related processes and trying to asses the cost and effort related in integrating these processes with SharePoint.

Well, good news! Much has been made of the integration between SharePoint and MS Office (which allows saving and check-in of office documents without navigating back to the DMS), but not enough has been made of the fact that SharePoint is by default exposed as a UNC file share. This is in most respects identical to the fileshares (and mapped network drives) that exist at almost all Life Sciences companies. This means that you should be able to use most software and processes that are compatible with a network share with SharePoint with little to no additional effort and cost. For a more detailed explaination, check out this information at MSDN.

Now, having said that, there are additional opportunities for more elegant integrations. SharePoint has an API available for development which could open up additional opportunities io integrate with SharePoints versioning model, properties, etc.