Sharing is Good

1. Replace your document management system. Just like a “real” DMS, SharePoint can store millions of documents, along with associated versions, and metadata. It can be configured to enforce retention policies and approval workflows, to allow each practice group to define its own document properties, and to enforce those policies and properties centrally.

The most controversial issue about using SharePoint as a DMS is the fact that it stores documents in an SQL database — as opposed to individual files on disk like legal DMS vendors such as OpenText and Interwoven. Storing documents in the database leads to two concerns:

• Are documents stored in SQL Server more likely to become corrupt than the same document stored as a file on a disk drive? This concern stems from earlier problems with Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage in early SQL databases — old fears die hard.
• The price and performance of storing unstructured BLOB content on (relatively) expensive disk subsystems used by database servers — and the additional performance overhead of retrieving BLOB content through a database server.