SharePoint evaluated as a Leader in latest edition of The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management

As written on blogs.office.com

We are very pleased to see SharePoint evaluated as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management—Business Content Services, Q2 2017. As Forrester noted:

Microsoft instigates content-in-the-cloud with a focus on SharePoint Online. Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2016 and ongoing investment into Office 365 and SharePoint Online has proved to be a significant catalyst in enterprises’ decisions to move their enterprise content to cloud services. Support for hybrid deployments continues to be an area of focus, supporting firms adopting cloud in a phased approach, or for specific use cases. 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 centers or on-premises SharePoint sites. Microsoft has a clear cloud-first vision, and has invested in eliminating the scalability barriers that challenged older, on-premises SharePoint editions. Microsoft continues to work to improve one-stop governance tools, such as common eDiscovery and legal holds across the Office 365 stack. Collaboration, including analytics and social graphing is a major area of focus and investment.

These are interesting times for enterprise content management (ECM). Industry thought leaders have noted the shift from archives for decades-long content retention, to agile collaboration-centric cloud toolsets that also empower security and reuse.

Forrester has been tracking this shift from traditional ECM to what they call business content services. Business content services emphasizes content creation, policy and reuse—but remains distinct from transactional, high volume content services (like those that support credit card processing). Microsoft, through Office 365 and SharePoint Online, has also been at the forefront of the charge.