ecm takes off in a new direction.

Byline: Martin Vietch

ecm takes off in a new direction

Last July, Microsoft took the unusual measure of breaking out the financial numbers for a product that few outside of IT and content management services would have heard of just a few years ago: Office SharePoint Server.

In Microsoft's 2007 financial year, the product, usually referred to as MOSS or just SharePoint, brought in about $800m for Microsoft. Not much compared with the riches generated by Office and Windows, but a sizeable franchise by anybody's standards. The figure was up by more than a third on the previous 12 months and underlines the way that SharePoint has sneaked into corporate affections to become another Microsoft-branded chunk of corporate digital infrastructure.

SharePoint was only released in 2001 but it is already woven into the fabric of many businesses and is increasingly considered a threat to "classic" enterprise content management (ECM) programs such as FileNet, Documentum and Open Text, as well as software from search and portal specialists.

There are the traditional Microsoft reasons for SharePoint's success. It has the familiar Microsoft look and feel, it integrates with sister programs, and subscription licences mean firms can try it out at for a low cost and with low risk. But the reasons for SharePoint's rise go well beyond the Microsoft effect.

"It filled a niche: the need to bring order to the chaos of mountains of Office documents," says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal of analyst firm CMS Watch. "Prior to SharePoint you were looking at $350 basic per seat for a document management tool. SharePoint brought it for free-ish."