Coming Soon:  SharePoint may well represent the opportunity of a lifetime for many ECM vendors, because it provides for a way to cross-over into the technology mainstream. This research paper analyzes the available options to create, nurture and develop a sales channel geared toward the SharePoint marketplace

Vendors seeking to develop a channel strategy to enter the SharePoint Marketplace.

Executive Summary

The rapid acceptance of SharePoint in both its free WSS version and the various paid versions of MOSS, has filled an important information management vacuum in the modern enterprise. Information workers have struggled for years to find an effective way to collaborate, easily share information, publish calendar events and create effective document sharing environments that unlike most ECM systems are useable by anyone and everyone.

In many ways SharePoint has taken the promise of Lotus Notes and really delivered a flexible information management environment centered around email, and the wildly popular Microsoft Office Suite. On one hand SharePoint has already demonstrated its popularity with users. (Just viewing one MS demonstration will have everyone in the room saying “I want that”. ) On the other hand, under the hood so to speak, SharePoint lends itself well to being an enterprise information management layer, and thus can be extended in a variety of ways using third party components to create and perhaps replace a wide variety of existing solutions. SharePoint provides a capability that a common client server file server architecture simply can not accomplish without a great deal of very heavy lifting.