Overcome the limitations of SharePoint with ECM: Two real-world examples

Your contract team works in one SharePoint site, your project managers in another, and the purchase orders and quotes behind both sit in your ERP system. Ask for every document tied to one customer project, and someone loses an afternoon stitching it together by hand. That is where SharePoint limitations start to hurt, and it is the point a global manufacturer reached after years of running SharePoint as its company-wide document management system (DMS).

The patchwork has a price. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026, the average breach in the United States reached a record $11.5 million, and noncompliance with regulations added about $201,000 to the average breach on its own. Contract libraries with loose permissions and unenforced retention periods are where that noncompliance starts.

This article follows the manufacturer through the two problems it hit, contract management and project collaboration, and the two different ways it solved them with enterprise content management (ECM). You'll also get a simple model for deciding which of your own content belongs in SharePoint and which belongs in your ECM.

Key takeaways

• SharePoint is a strong collaboration workspace, and it falls short once you need enforced retention, contract deadlines, and permission control across thousands of sites
• A global manufacturer spent years extending SharePoint with custom code and add-ons, and still ended up with shadow IT, rising search effort, and compliance risk
• For contracts, the answer was migration: contract files moved into Doxis, where retention periods and access rights are managed centrally
• For projects, SharePoint stayed the team workspace while Doxis filed project documents automatically into digital project files, next to the documents from the ERP system
• The right model is rarely "SharePoint or ECM": decide by content type, keeping working files in SharePoint and records with legal or business value in your ECM

What are the limitations of SharePoint as a document management system?

SharePoint's limitations as a document management system show once processes move beyond team collaboration. Out of the box, it gives you little help with cross-department workflows, retention rules tied to contract types, permission management across thousands of sites, or documents created in other business systems. Enterprises close these gaps with custom development or by connecting SharePoint to an ECM platform.

Where SharePoint shines, and where it stops

SharePoint earns its place in most enterprises. The trouble starts when it is asked to run processes it was never configured for.

Simple, but built for standard processes

SharePoint is intuitive. It mirrors the file storage system your employees already know, puts information on a web-based platform that decentralized teams can reach from anywhere, and works hand in hand with Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. For collaboration and simple document sharing, that is hard to beat.

Simplicity has a flip side. SharePoint is designed around standard processes, and every deviation from the standard means configuration, custom code, or a third-party add-on. For a company at the start of its digitalization journey, that trade-off is fine. For an enterprise with regulated records and processes that cross departments, it adds up fast.

When complexity grows, so do the workarounds

Our customer, a globally operating manufacturer, had used SharePoint as its DMS for many years, across a wide range of use cases and departments. In almost none of those use cases did SharePoint's standard document management functions meet the business's actual needs.

So the company did what most enterprises do. It programmed, extended, and adapted SharePoint, bought additional solutions, and built workarounds. Where none of that worked, people simply accepted the limitations.

The pattern is common. In a 2026 Doxis survey of 52 companies, 61.5% said they run document processes in Microsoft 365 or SharePoint, and many of them run network drives and an ERP system alongside it for the same processes. Three places for one process is where the gaps open up.

Example 1: Contract management that outgrew SharePoint

Contracts were the first place the gaps became impossible to ignore. A contract is a governed record with contract deadlines attached, and it needs firm rules for who may see it, how long it is kept, and when someone has to act on it.

Bolted-on workflows and custom code

To make contract management work in SharePoint, the company extended the metadata model and added specific reminder and notification features. It bought a separate workflow solution. Full-text search and metadata inheritance came on top, and some features had to be developed from scratch for this one use case.

Each addition solved one problem and created another system to maintain.

Missing access control and retention

The hardest gaps were the ones that matter most for compliance: access authorizations, automated workflows, and retention periods for contract documents. In SharePoint, these three areas took the most effort to build and the most effort to keep working.

For a US enterprise, retention is a legal question. IRS rules and, for public companies, Sarbanes-Oxley recordkeeping requirements set minimum periods for the records behind your financials, and a contract that disappears early or lingers too long becomes an audit finding. Your legal and finance teams define those periods, and a sound records management setup applies them automatically.

The hidden cost for your administrators

End users were reasonably happy. They used SharePoint's basic collaboration and filing functions without complaint.

The administrators carried the burden. Every new contract requirement turned into an IT project, and every SharePoint update put the custom code at risk.

Example 2: Project collaboration that became a file share

The second problem looked like a collaboration issue. It turned out to be an information issue.

Storage without collaboration

The manufacturer set up a SharePoint site for every project, where all internal project participants could communicate and share files. In practice, nobody shared. The sites became storage for drawings and plans, correspondence, and acceptance documents.

File sharing features built specifically for this use case went unused. SharePoint had become a more modern file system, and the collaboration value the company paid for never materialized.

The documents that never made it in

The deeper problem was what was missing. Documents created in third-party systems never reached the project sites, because uploading them by hand was far too much effort. Information from the ERP system and from production stayed where it was created.

As a result, the view of any project was always incomplete. Invoices, processing status, and quotes were all missing from the place where the project team was supposed to find everything.

What these limitations cost the business

Together, the two problems opened a gap in the company's daily work. It showed up in three ways:

1. Adoption fell. After an enthusiastic start, acceptance of SharePoint declined year after year, and shadow IT filled the gap
2. Search effort grew. Maintaining and finding documents took more time every year, while the transparency the project sites were meant to deliver kept shrinking
3. Compliance risk rose. Without proper access authorizations and enforced legal retention periods, the risk of violations increased

The result was that no one could find all the information in one place. Keeping project quality high and staying compliant took a great deal of manual work.

Two methods, one goal: a 360-degree view of your information

The decisive question was which software could meet all of these requirements. The honest answer was a combination of systems. No amount of extra effort would have made SharePoint alone solve both problems.

Doxis ran workshops with the customer around one goal for both sub-projects: a 360-degree view of all relevant information. That shared goal led to two different approaches.

Method 1: Move contracts into Doxis

For contracts, migration to Doxis was the better route. Doxis Contract Lifecycle Management already covered the deadline notifications and review workflows the company had built by hand in SharePoint, so moving the contracts retired a whole layer of custom code.

In a structured migration project, tens of thousands of contract files were moved into Doxis together with their metadata. Once the migration was checked for completeness, the SharePoint pages and documents were deleted.

Since then, every contract lives in a digital file in Doxis, and Doxis applies the retention periods and access rights. Contract managers work with one governed record per contract.

Method 2: Keep SharePoint, connect it to Doxis

For project work, the company kept what SharePoint does well. SharePoint remained the central entry point for all project participants, and Doxis was added where information was missing.

The Doxis SharePoint integration files project documents from SharePoint libraries into Doxis eFiles, fully automatically or on demand. Documents keep their original format, are indexed automatically, and SharePoint metadata maps to Doxis fields. When someone changes a document and it is filed again, Doxis stores a new version, so no earlier state is lost.

Documents from the ERP system and other key applications are filed in Doxis through Doxis SmartBridges and assigned to the right project using their metadata. The outcome is one digital project file that holds everything, however and wherever each document was created. That gives the company two advantages:

1. Project teams search one structured file for every project document, and they can open Doxis eFiles as tabs right inside their Microsoft Teams channels
2. Colleagues who never work in SharePoint, in finance or production for example, reach the same complete project file in Doxis

With this connected archiving setup, Doxis files the SharePoint project documents automatically into the project eFile, next to the documents from the ERP system. How you combine the connectors depends on your own system landscape, and this customer's project file is a configuration built for its project business.

What's next: linking contracts to projects

The next step is one the company had not even considered at the start. Every project in its business rests on one or more contracts, so the two worlds belong together.

With contracts migrated to Doxis and complete project files in place, contracts can now be linked to projects, and projects to contracts. Project managers in particular see the contracts behind their project without searching a second system.

SharePoint, ECM, or both? How to decide where your content belongs

Most enterprises frame this as a platform decision. It is a content decision. The useful question is what each type of document needs over its lifetime, and the table below gives a starting point.

If a document only matters while a team is working on it, leave it in SharePoint. If it has to survive an auditor, a dispute, or an employee leaving, file it in your ECM.

Beyond SharePoint: managing the full document lifecycle

Fixing contracts and project files solves two visible problems. The broader issue is that a document's life starts long before anyone saves it to a SharePoint library, and it ends years after the project team has moved on.

A supplier contract arrives as a scan or a PDF and has to be captured and classified. It moves through an approval workflow, gets signed, and has to be filed with the right metadata. For years afterward it must stay findable, protected, and retained under the rule that applies to it, and then be deleted on schedule. Run each of those stages in a different system and you rebuild the same silos this manufacturer was trying to escape.

A complete lifecycle covers these stages:

• Capture: incoming documents classified and their data extracted with intelligent document processing
• Filing and versioning: one authoritative version of every document, stored in the right business context
• Retention and archiving: rules per document class, legal holds when you need them, and long-term storage (see this US guide to audit-proof archiving)
• Retrieval: AI document search across content from every connected system
• Integration: documents linked to the ERP and Microsoft 365 applications your teams already use, a core requirement of ECM for manufacturing

Make SharePoint and ECM work together with Doxis

If your SharePoint estate has grown into a mix of custom code, unused sites, and contracts nobody can fully account for, you don't have to replace it. Doxis connects to SharePoint and SharePoint Online, files documents automatically into structured eFiles with their metadata and version history, and takes over the retention, access control, and deadline management that SharePoint leaves to you.

That SharePoint connection is one part of the Doxis Intelligent Content Automation platform. The same platform reads incoming documents with AI and runs the process automation for approvals and follow-up tasks, so the content you file from SharePoint keeps working in your business processes.

• Keep SharePoint as the workspace your teams know, and add governance behind it
• File SharePoint documents automatically, in their original format, with full version history
• Apply retention periods and access rights centrally in Doxis
• Bring ERP documents and SharePoint documents together in one project or contract file
• Work with Doxis eFiles directly in Microsoft Teams
• Extend the same platform to archiving, invoice processing, and HR files as your needs grow

Doxis is a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management 2026. In a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, global manufacturer SEW-EURODRIVE moved to a single global ECM with Doxis and achieved a 336% ROI with payback in under six months. Request a free demo to see how Doxis works with your SharePoint environment.

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