Microsoft: ECM with Sharepoint

Trends 2007, the first conference devoted to Microsoft Sharepoint in Life Sciences, was held on November 8th, 2007 in Princeton, NJ.

As most of you know, Sharepoint is Microsoft's offering for enterprise content management (ECM). Although it has been used to some extent in Life Sciences, the domain areas have been everywhere but in a regulated environment. With the release of Sharepoint Server 2007 and industry-focused solutions from First Consulting Group (FCG) and NextDocs, the time for Microsoft as a viable contender in a regulated and unregulated environment has arrived.

Overview

The conference consisted of 10 speaker presentations and an all-day exhibit with 11 vendors. These included AdlibSoftware, Arx, Axicos, Brimstone, FCG, Interse, IntraSphere, K2, KnowledgeLake, Microsoft, and Xinnovation. As I noted in a previous post, you probably have not heard of many of these companies. The key reason for that is their focus on Microsoft Sharepoint.

Before I get into the details of this meeting, it's important to tell you what the acronym MOSS stands for. This one was new to me as well and stands for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. Keep this in mind, even though I will more often just use the letter SP to refer to Sharepoint.

The keynote presentation was given by Tamir Orbach of Microsoft and focused on "Breaking the Barriers to User Adoption." I will focus on this talk in the this first post and write separate pieces on some of the other presentations.

These other presentations were as follows:

• Evolution of regulatory information exchange - Michel Brennan, Centocor
• The business case for ECM - Steve Gens, Gens and Associates
• Content management via metadata driven solutions - Gabor Fari, Microsoft
• Optimizing the process of content migration across a global organization - Dave Biersach, Pfizer
• FirstPoint, the next generation of ECM - Jennifer Wemstrom, FCG
• Biogen-Idec Vision: The new user-experience driven model for ECM - Michael Sauter, Biogen Idec
• Innovative CRM solutions for the Pharma industry - Sebastian Merlöv, Brimstone International
• Medical communications management on an MS platform - Steve Gruber, FCG
• Managing the contracting process - Barbara Staehelin, Axicos

User Adoption of ECM

A key and recurring theme at this conference was a true focus on the enterprise-wide use of content management in absolute rather than relative terms. In other words, enterprise in this context means that a very large percentage of the total employee base uses the system. This is not the same as the use of a single platform like Documentum for all documents that contribute to marketing authorization submissions. As we know, although the platform may be used globally, the number of users is relatively small.

In this context, the talk by Mr. Orbach was stressing the broad use of SP for both content management and collaboration. This would be in both regulated and non-regulated environments. Until now, SP has primarily been used in the non-regulated setting where bare-bones content management, workflow or security functions are sufficient. Looking at this environment, you can expect that SP will be a viable and potentially more cost effective solution than existing tools. By these I primarily mean IBM Lotus Notes and OpenText Livelink. Indeed, there were several presentations (not this one by Mr. Orbach) that discussed migrations from these platforms.

In the regulated environment, where Documentum has set the features/functions standard, business and IT decision makers are looking for equivalence from a tool like SP. Mr. Orbach focused not only on such equivalence but on features that deliver additional value. Here are some that stood out for me:

• Users can work strictly within the MS Office tools and add/view all of the metadata (stored in SP) in-line within those applications;
• Document templates are role sensitive. In other words, only those templates are available to you that have been authorized for use based on your role(s);
• Records retention rules are displayed directly in the document display (although not embedded in the document) when that document is saved;
• The check-in function supports both minor and major revisions and a checked out document can be edited iteratively with all changes automatically written back to the repository;
• Workflows can be accessed and used directly from the MS Office application;
• When using PowerPoint, users have access to a slide library and can choose the ones they need for a new presentation. The layout of the selected slide(s) can be brought in 'as is' or be automatically converted to the new presentation style

With SP 2007, you can assume that the vast majority of document management functions we are accustomed to in this industry are supported by the software.

Life Sciences Examples

Since the focus of the meeting was the use of SP in Life Sciences, Mr. Orbach gave several examples of real implementations. These include:

• Purdue Pharma: Clinical outsourcing management;
• Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research: R&D portfolio management;
• West Pharma: Web site content management

Although not stated, I am guessing that none of these are validated systems. Rather than assume that they can't be validated, it would be more correct to assume that a deliberate decision was made to exclude any regulated content from these repositories. I will talk about this problem in another post.