SharePoint as a Document Management System

I had a requirement to migrate Lotus Notes to SharePoint. The main features required were "Document Management".

The following are the advantages of SharePoint compared to Lotus Notes as a Document Management System.

• User Interface
  
  SharePoint provides an excellent user interface to add/update/delete/tag/search documents.
  
  
• Versioning
  
  SharePoint provides document versioning.
  
  
• Records Center
  
  The records centers template provides a quick solution to making historical records of documents.
  
  
• Drag & Drop
  
  Bulk document upload is supported in SharePoint 2013 using the drag & drop feature.
  
  
  
  
• Explorer View
  
  SharePoint supports WebDAV to enable Explorer View. This helps people to operate in an explorer fashion they are already familiar with.
  
  
• Shredded Storage
  
  If your client document management involves heavy traffic, a reduction in bandwidth usage and faster updating can be done using Shredded Storage.
  
  
  
  
• Remote BLOB Storage
  
  SharePoint supports storing document content in a database or external file systems. This will relax the site collection size limits.
  
  
• Content Indexing and Filters
  
  By default SharePoint supports content-indexing of popular Office documents, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on. For custom filtering we can purchase and install third party filters for PDF and so on.

More Features

Check-in, Check-out, Mobile Support and Information Management Policies are more features in the document management arena.

Queries

The following are the parameters we need to capture for the document migration.

1. Number of documents in store
2. Type of documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and so on)
3. Average size of documents
4. Metadata requirement
5. Content Type / Site Column requirement
6. Version requirement
7. Expected growth in a year
8. Search requirements (full-text search, metadata-based)
9. Records requirement (making a document a historical evidence)
10. Site Template (blank, team site)
11. Workflows requirements (approval, signature and so on)
12. Document Governance (folders, metadata, mandatory fields)
13. Type of user-authentication
14. Permission roles, groups
15. Preserving of system-values (created by and created date)
16. Life cycle of a document (auto-archive, auto-delete, recycle-bin usage and so on)
17. Policies around documents

References

Overview of document management in SharePoint 2013.

Summary

In this article I have highlighted the features of SharePoint as a Document Management System.