Document Management Systems & SharePoint: Your Questions Answered

Key Takeaways

• A Document Management System (DMS) is essential for modern digital workplaces, centralising storage of documents, data, images, video, and more while enabling secure access, version control, compliance management, and collaborative workflows.​
• SharePoint is a comprehensive, purpose-built Document Management System that offers all core DMS functionality with exceptional integration across Microsoft 365—and for organisations already using Teams, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft technologies, it eliminates technology silos and significantly improves employee experience.​
• SharePoint Premium (formerly Microsoft Syntex) adds intelligent document processing and AI-powered content classification, automatically finding, organising, and classifying unstructured data across SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and Exchange—unlocking value from the 80% of enterprise data that remains unstructured.​
• While off-the-shelf DMS solutions offer standardised structures and faster initial setup, SharePoint provides flexibility to craft a solution tailored to your specific business needs—and with the right partner, it scales and adapts as your organisation evolves.

What is a Document Management System (DMS)? How important is a DMS to a modern digital workplace? Is SharePoint better than an off-the-shelf DMS?

At Silicon Reef, we’ve implemented dozens of document management solutions, and these are questions we hear all the time? This FAQ walks through the key considerations—and why, for most organisations already in the Microsoft ecosystem, SharePoint is the stronger choice.

Let’s start by being clear about what we mean by a Document Management System (DMS).

What is a Document Management System (DMS)?

A DMS is a software solution that enables documents to be organised, stored, shared, tracked, and managed. Don’t take the term ‘document management’ too literally: its historic, and systems cater for a variety of content and file types. As well as text-based files, this includes data files, presentations, images, scans, audio and video, email, HTML web content, and even CAD drawings.

Key features include permissions and access controls, document indexing, search capabilities, version control, and document lifecycle management. By centralising storage, a DMS aims to improve access, and therefore productivity, as well as data security and compliance.

How Important is a DMS to a Modern Digital Workplace?

In short, its critical. A good Document Management System makes a modern digital workplace possible, by providing much of the required functionality, but also amplifies the benefits you see. Helping to streamline processes, improve productivity, aid remote working, ensure compliance, and secure sensitive information.

It provides centralised document/file storage, with ease of access, underpinned by high levels of searchability. It improves collaboration by enabling remote, anywhere access and facilitates multiple people simultaneously working on the same document. Document version control ensures that all changes are tracked, allows for the restoration of previous versions, and avoids redundancy. It aids compliance through document retention, privacy, and security policies and improves data security with encryption, audit trails, access controls, and role-based permissions. It provides efficiency improvements with workflow automations, and reductions in physical storage.

Is SharePoint a Proper Document Management System?

Without doubt, yes! Although its capable of being much more than a DMS, it’s a strong choice for businesses. And even more so for those organisations already using key Microsoft technologies, such as Teams and Microsoft 365.

SharePoint is a comprehensive solution, offering all the functionality you’d expect from a Document Management System. However, the flip side of its rich functionality is that it requires a well-thought-out adoption programme. Though its records management is good, organisations with highly specific retention and archival requirements may need additional customisation, or to use Microsoft Purview (see below).

For those already using other Microsoft technologies, the integration is superb. It eliminates a lot of potential problems for technology owners and adds significantly to employee experience and efficiencies. For many SharePoint is already licenced, known by IT, and fits nicely into an established security model.

How do you Create a SharePoint Document Management System?

Although SharePoint has excellent DMS functionality, when considering a DMS in Microsoft 365 we advocate incorporating up to three other technologies. These are Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Power Platform. All three extend the capabilities of SharePoint.

Entra ID is central to identity and access management for Microsoft services and may already be in use in your organisation. It adds to your DMS by providing strong identity and access management, advanced security features, conditional access, and seamless integration with Microsoft 365’s security tools. Providing role-based access, multi-factor authentication, conditional access policies, and continuous threat detection to protect sensitive documents.

Purview significantly strengthens data compliance, governance, and risk management capabilities across Microsoft 365, including SharePoint. It is thoroughly integrated with SharePoint and provides the tools to enforce strict security policies, manage document retention, and respond to compliance queries.

If there is a criticism of SharePoint DMS, it’s that building complex workflows, reports, and document structures typically requires development resources or a third-party add-on. That’s where Microsoft Power Platform comes in. This set of low-code development tools allows staff, often without specialist IT skills, to build custom business applications, automate workflows, and analyse data themselves.

Is SharePoint Better Than an Off-the-Shelf Document Management System?

The short answer is yes. For most organisations SharePoint is the best Document Management System to choose. It’s widely used, already included in many Microsoft subscription plans, thoroughly integrated with key Microsoft applications and services, and has extensive knowledge and support available.

But of course, it depends on what you want from your DMS. With an off-the-shelf solution a lot of the thinking has already been done for you and this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. It will have been designed to meet common needs and will have an established look and structure. This can save time and effort, but you may also find this inflexible and that it dictates processes. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution can also prove overly complicated, expensive to support and cumbersome to use.

Whereas, with the right partner, you can craft SharePoint into whatever you want it to be. Think of it as a huge set of Lego pieces, that’s open to an array of possibilities. Albeit one without a definitive set of instructions.

We do a lot of SharePoint projects and while there’s much commonality, in terms of high-level requirements, no two solutions are the same. That reflects the individuality of different clients’ specific needs. And it shows how and why SharePoint scores over off-the-shelf alternatives. SharePoint provides flexibility now and the capability to flex and grow as your business does.

In the table we’ve summarised some of the pros and cons of off-the-shelf solutions compared to Microsoft’s SharePoint.

Does SharePoint Premium Offer an Even Better Document Management System?

SharePoint Premium is the new branding for Microsoft Syntex and is relevant to corporate customers. SharePoint Premium provides a set of complementary value-added services that sit on top of SharePoint to improve content management.

Microsoft describes it as ‘a content understanding, processing, and compliance service that uses intelligent document processing, content artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced machine learning’. This will ‘automatically and thoughtfully find, organise, and classify documents in your SharePoint libraries, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange’.

With around 80% of enterprise data currently unstructured (Bob Lewes, CIO.com), SharePoint Premium offers the chance to derive value from this data. So, as an addition to SharePoint, for many SharePoint Premium will offer an even better DMS.

Our blog, ‘What is SharePoint Premium?’ provides a more detailed explanation of SharePoint Premium, while this Microsoft blog provides an excellent overview of the service.

SharePoint provides all the core functionalities required of a Document Management System. Crucially, for organisations using other Microsoft technologies it provides superb and hassle-free integration. Plus, Microsoft’s additional complementary services take security, governance, compliance, automation, and content management and search to another level. SharePoint offers the functionality and flexibility for your DMS to be exactly what you want and to deliver real value to your organisation. But to achieve that, most will require the guidance of a good SharePoint partner.