One of Australia & New Zealand's Big Four banks  is steering a path to a SharePoint 2013 future although keeping its role limited to its perceived strengths in intranet and document collaboration.

The bank has been using SharePoint for project and team collaboration for almost 10 years, while conventional ECM heavyweights such as Documentum, FileNet  and Oracle UCM still handle the heavy lifting of document and records management.

Standard network file shares are also still employed although SharePoint has replaced their use in many instances . 

The bank is presently using SharePoint 2007 but a migration to 2010 will take place later this year at which time the bank is planning to upgrade to a SharePoint intranet from an in-house developed platform. A future upgrade to SharePoint 2013 is also on the roadmap although the bank intends to retain IBM WebSphere Content Manager for its public facing web site

The present intranet platform is 10-15 years old and holds a lot of redundant and duplicated content so as part of the SharePoint 2010 migration the bank is cleaning this up as well as simplifying and consolidating the publishing function which will be centralised and placed under the control of the corporate communications team.

There are a number of concerns that would prevent the bank considering SharePoint as a replacement for its existing ECM systems. 

It does not perceive Sharepoint as a strategic choice for enterprise scale document & records management, focusing on its role in departmental or divisional document storage.

According to one of the bank's  Enterprise Architects ,"We do have some business processes implemented in SharePoint utilising some rudimentary workflow functionality as well as the Nintex workflow add-on, but we wouldn't be considering implementing business process applications on the ECM platform anyway

"We allow users to use SharePoint as a document-centric collaboration tool and utility. This gives our users more flexibility but IT is still in control of provisioning project, team and collaboration sites."

There is no portal integration between SharePoint and any other repositories and documents are manually uploaded into SharePoint.

"We never intended to use SharePoint  to store restricted or classified information or use it to build complex applications," he said.

"Many organisations that don't have an existing ECM solution could consider SharePoint for that purpose. The bank has made a decision that we are not going to use SharePoint for customer related documents.

"We have existing platforms for workflow processes which includes business process management (BPM), ECM  and document generation and we don't consider SharePoint in that context."

"This will be integrated with SharePoint but used in a more robust and controlled manner."

The bank has been scanning documents for some time, and is focused on transitioning to strategic enterprise components that employ Kofax scanning and OCR, Pegasystems BPM and EMC xPression Enterprise Edition for document generation with FileNet as the EDRMS.

"There is some work to do but we have  put all the building blocks in place to support digitisation which is part of our strategic roadmap," said a spokesman.