The latest edition of the annual report published by Forrester, a company that collaborates with tech and enterprise leaders to create strategies focused on customers and business growth, has provided good news for Microsoft and its SharePoint Server.
This report is titled ‘Forrester Wave: Enterprise Content Management – Business Content Services, Q2’ and the results show that Microsoft SharePoint 2016 is considered to be a leader within its particular field. The report made note of the fact that the market for enterprise content management (ECM) is one that is currently in something of a state of flux, but that the platform provided by Microsoft stands out from the mass of other products for a number of reasons.
According to the report from Forrester, the primary reasons for the changes that the sector of ECM is experiencing are that those who have led it over a lengthy period of time are in the process of making investments in road maps that prioritise the cloud, efforts to bring their technology up to date and new platforms. The report indicates that the motivation for these investments – and the uncertainty within the sector that they are creating – is the arrival of fresh ECM platforms and the need for established ones to compete against them.
However, despite the question marks for many of these providers, Forrester found that the SharePoint 2016, Office 365 and SharePoint Online platforms provided by Microsoft left the software giant in a strong position to ride out the current transitions within this market. The report states that the company starts the content in the cloud process via its SharePoint Online focus and that its continuing SharePoint Online and Office 365 investments were proving to be a major catalyst for the decisions of businesses to adopt cloud services for their content.
The report by Forrester also praises the focus from Microsoft on offering hybrid deployment support, providing the necessary tools for enterprises that wish to take a phased approach to their cloud adoption, as well as specific use cases, adding that: “Microsoft’s FastTrack migration program, as well as its partners, provides a range of options for customers that want to move documents out of their own in-house data centres or on-premises SharePoint sites.”
Forrester’s report went on to state that the tech giant had a clear vision that prioritised the cloud and had put the time and money into removing those scalability barriers that had been an issue with its earlier on-site versions of SharePoint. It concluded by arguing that Microsoft was still working on enhancing its tools for one-stop governance, for example eDiscovery, as well as Office 365 stack legal holds, with future investment to be concentrated on social graphing, analytics and other tools for collaborative working.
Given the fact that many of the solutions for assisting businesses with collaboration and communication that we provide at WM Reply are built around SharePoint, this report is of real interest to us. Why not call us for further details of what we can do for you?