Advanced Document Management System (DMS) for sharepoint ?

[maxwell888]

Does anyone know of a solution which enhances the Document Management Features of Sharepoint 365 and makes it a "proper DMS" ? Are there vendors out there which build their DMS solution on the sharepoint platform, rather than developing their own solution from scratch ? We would love to keep all our documents within the office 365 ecosystem, but provide our users with everything a modern DMS has to offer these days.

Any suggestions and experiences welcome.

[#2]

Well, IMHO SharePoint is a light DMS and the Team is working hard to add modern DMS features so any customer with out any doubt can select SPO as its preferred DMS

[#3]

@maxwell888 
What kind of advanced DMS functionality are you looking for? e.g. Records management, metadata support, metadata versioning, ...

Paul | SLIM Applications

[#4]

@Paul de Jong 

Not the OP, but enforcement of required fields is a big one. They have moved away from this and it is causing more problems than it solved.

[#5]

@jcgonzalezmartin 

Hi,

One of my clients is in the process of modernization of the existing DMS that runs on SharePoint 2013. There are multiple architectural options (SP 2019 on prem, SPO, custom option for Azure cloud). What we are trying to figure out if SharePoint can support scale that my client has.

Currently there are 50+ million documents that stored in 100+ site collections with thousand+ subsites in each site collection. There are already 150 content databases. This environment is growing, even with retention/purging process, we are projecting 250 million documents in 10 years. The question is can SharePoint (on prem or online) scale to support this system? 

[#6]

The same limitations on on-premises SharePoint database size are different in online so that number of databases wouldn't be the same. You can go up to 4tb and I think it's 100million files. What you need to consider though is how it's used. This size solution works for records type usage where there are few writes but lots of reads mainly through search i.e. a records repository. For collaboration on documents you'll want a simpler structure and size mostly function and task driven. I know of providers that implement DMS meta data solutions by configuring libraries folders and default meta data that might work for records but is too structured for day to day collaboration. I would consider separating into collaboration in SharePoint and records in Azure with Blob storage and Azure search.

[#7]

@PhoenixMS 

Agree, support for required metadata fields is indeed limited. There are also no major improvements to be expected from the roadmap.

However, improving the handling of required metadata is not listed. There are several 3rd party solutions that offer the capability to select content types and set custom metadata. They can also automatically extract properties from files (e.g. keywords from PDF files, GPS coordinates jpg files, EXIF metadata from images, ..) and capture the values into SharePoint columns.

Overall I think the SharePoint platform provides great functionality (search, scalability, integration Office, multiple devices, ..) but it is weak in areas like RM and metadata compared to other DMS solutions. They are also working on promising AI solutions (e.g. Project Cortex).

If the metadata functionality is a key component in your ECM strategy then you may to have to consider moving to another DMS solution or use an interim solution (e.g. SLIM Companion Explorer) to address the functionality gaps on the current platform.

Paul | SLIM Applications

[#8]

Hi, yes it is possible for going with SharePoint as your Modern DMS. I lead and executed establishing SharePoint Online as Modern DMS in my organization having 50+business functional teams and 8 TB+ data. Its a myth that SharePoint is complex to set up but you should know rightly how to configure the features and use all platform features properly.

[#9]

@PhoenixMS You may consider a power automate flow to check for mandatory metadata. Trigger it on New and/or Edit events.
Sure some clever person can do the same as that indicator: missing metadata. Or maybe extract it value true or false. 
Run a weekly check flow for the administrators, and send an alert to the EditedBy.