“Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. This digital information is often referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.” WikiPedia

The SharePoint Platform is the next step forward in Content Management because it allows Organisations to reuse common framework patterns developed by Microsoft rather than developing their own. Never before have the boundaries of the ownership of elements been so hard to define and manage within an Organisation.

Applications have often been built on a bespoke basis, using ASP.NET and SQL technology stack, where the separation between the content and the system are easily defined by architectural layers and the roles that create them. SharePoint has blurred this separation by allowing the architecture of systems and management of content by Information Workers within the same interface without the need for Solution Architects and Developers. This can often be compared to the same issues raised by Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access solutions designed by Information Workers in the past.

“Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.” WikiPedia

Traditional Applications typically followed a more structured software engineering process called Application Lifecycle Management. With the power being given to the Information Worker by default with SharePoint, control of the Systems has left the hands of the IT team and moved into a more uncontrollable state of typically untrained individuals.

The main challenge of using the SharePoint Platform is often how an Organisation governs both Content Management and Application Lifecycle Management. The Microsoft MSDN web site has many disperse articles on this this topic and this survey will hope to identify common issues across implementations.