Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents

Black Blade Associates has just released a new black paper: Enhancing SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents. Lack of Virtual Document support is one the most common reasons consumers pass up SharePoint in favor of more expensive document management systems, like Documentum. The black paper describes how the docBlock Ascend appliance adds Virtual Document support to SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 have many new features, including new co-authoring capabilities in Microsoft Word. While co-authoring is a great addition to Office 2010, co-authoring is not enough of a feature enhancement to SharePoint to make SharePoint a true document management platform. Organizations require the power of Virtual Documents to help SharePoint fulfill its potential for advanced document management.

Black Blade proves this assertion by presenting several document management scenarios which are either made possible by or made practical by incorporating Virtual Document capability. The black paper also covers how docBlock Ascend’s Virtual Documents enhance the document management capabilities of SharePoint 2010 beyond concurrent authoring. Here is a summary of enhancements docBlock Ascend Virtual Documents provide over out of the box SharePoint 2010 and Word 2010 features:

Granular concurrency control
System prevents one person from overwriting another person’s edits to a document section without need for conflict resolution.
Granular governance
System provides direct support for versioning, permissions, alerts, workflows, and audit trails down to the level of document sections.
Enhanced document authoring task management
Editors and reviewers may be assigned on a document section by document section basis through integrated task management.
Document structure management
Specialized user interface to manage the structure of each Virtual Document and its sections as a single entity.

A more detailed feature comparison between SharePoint 2010, Word 2010, and docBlock can be found here:

http://www.blackbladeinc.com/en-us/products/docBlock/Pages/FeatureComparison.aspx

Here’s a peek at the rest of the topics covered in the black paper:

Virtual Documents Primer

SharePoint 2010 Primer

Usage Scenarios

        Team-based document authoring

        Document authoring with external users

        Geographically distributed document authoring

        Sensitive document authoring

        Combined automated and human document authoring

New Capabilities with 2010

        Document Sets

        Metadata Services

        Word Automation Services

        Word Web App

        Word 2010

        Project 2010