Integrating Interwoven Teamsite into SharePoint for Content Management

Question

I'm working on a roadmap to re-architect our corporate intranet, and I'm stuck on a hard decision around content management.

We own licences for Interwoven TeamSite, and we use it to manage our content for our externally-facing internet site, our main intranet, and a couple of big internal knowledge exchanges.

It's looking likely that I'll recommend Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 for the main platform for the intranet. I saw a demo yesterday of a great intranet based on SharePoint with the Microsoft CMS for content management, and I'd like to do something similar, except leveraging our current Interwoven installation.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of integration? Any 'gotchas' or lessons learned from integrating Interwoven and SharePoint?

Answer 1

No! Don't do it! SharePoint WSS 3.0 used to have crappy CM, so Microsoft best practice was to use MS ECM in conjunction. From 2007 on, MS built the CM platform into SharePoint. You will have a very hard time stripping the MS ECM out and cludging something else it. Besides, Interwoven isn't a top-quarter product. If you're using it in your company, start moving away from it. OpenText and MS make much better solutions.

In short, you're asking for trouble if you try and use Interwoven TeamSite for SharePoint's ECM - They DO NOT play well together.

Answer 2

With all these things the important question is the business requirements. Why does SharePoint looks more appealing than TeamSite from this perspective, especially as it seems similar in many respects (I don't know it)? What features are you missing and what problems you're currently experiencing with TeamSite?

I'd consider the time and costs involved with getting up to speed with SharePoint. Particularly if custom development is required you may experience quite a learning curve. It's worth it to salespeople to put a lot of time into nice demos (or download one) but how long would it take a customer to get it to that point? You already have the knowledge and resources for TeamSite.

This isn't intended to dissuade you, but some points to consider.