If you are in the midst of a discovery process, you will find some surprising information in the article “MOSS 2007 Document Management Services — Document Centralization” here. This Web log post appeared on Mastering SharePoint Community on November 19, 2008. The author was Bob Mixon. The write up covers a number of SharePoint document management topics, but for me the most important point was in this comment:
I don’t believe you will find anyone (or I at least hope not) at Microsoft recommending the use of a single Document Library to store all of your organizations documents.
What this means is that Microsoft is opening the door to third party vendors who can build a single collection of documents, put them in one place, and provide access control tools so the documents in the repository cannot be changed. The fancy word for this is spoliation. SharePoint, the Swiss Army knife for content, ships with a broken knife blade and some rust on the moving parts. You may find the many collections approach useful. I don’t think some senior managers who are facing litigation will be too thrilled to learn that special purpose systems will be needed because SharePoint doesn’t recommend a single repository. If you have licked this problem, let me know.
Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008