As an #ECM Expert, I am continuously faced with the question of using SharePoint as a document management solution compared to the core #EDMS #ECM #BPM solutions i.e. Laserfiche in the market.
Comparing Laserfiche to SharePoint is like comparing an apple to an orange but apparently, people are using SharePoint just like we would want them to use #ECM. They are both fruits but totally different.
SharePoint is well-suited for organizations that need to manage multiple web sites with one tool that takes advantages of templated site design, but you are limited in its design strategies and "box-building" layouts.
SharePoint does not have its own scanning interface and also no PDF. I know the metadata is the same and it is user friendly as SharePoint is an intranet system 'out of the box'. It will do search and retrieval with metadata. That is all.
No Scanning, No Workflow, SharePoint does have audit trail however. All the functionality for SharePoint comes from 3rd party add-ons which have an additional cost to both purchase and to configure. SharePoint implementations double or triple what the system actually cost to purchase.
Laserfiche however with the introduction has most of these things 'out of the box'. Scanning, Workflow, etc. with relatively little configuration, therefore reducing costs. It too has 3rd party add-ons which add additional functionality to match or trump SharePoint.
Basically the main differences is what the 2 products do 'out of the box' which is the key comparison. It's also important to note that the Laserfiche SharePoint integration components also come free.
So if you have already invested a lot of money in SharePoint and would like to use it as an external portal for upload and download of documents, put some metadata in SharePoint and Laserfiche grab the files and their metadata to use them as Laserfiche metadata to do some workflow with them.
"Send to Laserfiche" allows users to manually move a document from SharePoint to Laserfiche, using Laserfiche as a "Records Center". The typical use case for this is that collaboration is done in SharePoint, and when the document is complete you move it to Laserfiche to take advantage of our Records Management functionality. You can leave the document in SharePoint, delete it, or replace it with a link to it in Web Access.
Federated search allows SharePoint to crawl a Laserfiche repository and present Laserfiche documents in the results of a search performed in SharePoint.
The Laserfiche-SharePoint integration perfectly illustrates how ECM software provides more key features to make business process management—and workers—more efficient. For example, as the deployment of SharePoint sites has accelerated, so has the unstructured content created by these sites. SharePoint users are now able to look into Laserfiche through links in SharePoint, and can retrieve Laserfiche and SharePoint content simultaneously from the SharePoint interface. (Organizations that create large amounts of content through SharePoint will find this integrated search capability especially appealing as it capitalizes on Laserfiche's ability to efficiently store voluminous content collections, helping users to keep the size of their SharePoint site within limits.)
Also, prior to this integration, SharePoint offered no simple way to handle scanned paper. However, now integrating scanned paper documents into collaborative functions is easily and quickly managed with Laserfiche's intuitive document capture and imaging functionality. Paper documents can be scanned directly from SharePoint into Laserfiche.
Julius Macaulay-Agbi is an #EDMS #ECM #BPM Consultant with more than 10 years of experience. A specialist in document and content management as well as Enterprise architecture.
