C3 Associates

James Watson came back to spend a valuable hour talking about the findings of Doculabs white paper “The Co-Existence of Microsoft SharePoint and Advanced ECM Platforms: What You Need to Know,” which you can find here.

Doculabs asks 10 very good questions that all organizations considering an ECM implementation should be considering. I won’t go into all of the points here but I will highlight I thought were a few salient ideas. First off, James got things started with a bang by repeating what he says he hears all the time when discussing MOSS. “Sounds great,” they say, “I just don’t want another Lotus Notes.” What he means by this is that Lotus Notes was (is) an excellent tool for workgroup level collaboration but becomes a management nightmare when trying to scale it enterprise wide without proper planning.

So, given that, what is the best way to deploy MOSS? First, James suggests that a MOSS deployment needs dedicated resources. This is significant. Because of the MOSS has been positioned as an easy-to-use tool for information workers, there is a tendency to think that departmental-level personnel should be empowered to create new sites as they see fit. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it just won’t likely scale well (from a usability perspective, not a technology perspective). I agree with James’s suggestion to draw a line in the sand when multiple workgroups start creating environments with a high degree of commonality. At this point, create a centralized support team and start work on an enterprise taxonomy.

In terms of the relationship between MOSS and existing ECM systems, Doculabs advocates a co-existence strategy. This is based on their belief that MOSS, as it currently stands and considering only out-of-the-box functionality, is probably not ready to be the one system of record for an organization. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach; as was noted earlier SharePoint may very well fit the bill in certain use cases where collaboration is the key requirement. It will likely evolve over time but, in Doculabs opinion, there will be a place in the market for fully-fledged ECM tools for a long time to come.

This is consistent with what I have been seeing from my clients as well. Most recognize the power of MOSS but also realize that more robust records managment requirements are likely going to require a more mature tool for the foreseeable future. Co-existence can help provide a ‘best of both worlds’ approach that satisfies most if not all business requirements.

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Dave Larson from Project Leadership Associates presented his perspective on the viability of SharePoint as an ECM platform. He started with a brief history of SharePoint and highlighted some of the improvements in MOSS 2007 over past versions. His review was very similar to some of the presentations I’ve given in the past which can be found here.

Dave ran a bit short on time (AIIM runs a tight ship) and was only able to talk about two of the three case studies he had to present. His first example was about the IS department of a global investment firm based in Chicago. They had no incumbent document management solution in place and decided to use MOSS exclusively; their plan is to replace their disorganized network share with SharePoint. Dave reported that the users found that they were better able to find documents and appreciated the ability to collaborate using discussion forums and other tools. A question came up about the training and change management requirements for a MOSS implementation of this kind. Dave didn’t have a lot of information on this but indicated that things had gone well.

My take on this is that IT users are far more likely to willingly adopt a tool like SharePoint because they’re more likely to embrace new technology. In this case, it also seems like there was a very strong use case for SharePoint and it solved a pressing business problem. This approach ties in to what Peggy said in her opening remarks; ECM is most successful when groups act locally while thinking globally. If this is the case here, the structure created for the IT group will have been built with scalability in mind. It would be interesting to be able to look into a crystal ball and see whether this solution is successfully deployed to other functional areas in the organization in the future. This is the big challenge for many ECM deployments regardless of platform. It also brings us back to the question that keeps coming up; whether MOSS can handle some of the “heavy lifting” ECM requirements like records management and integrated compliance. In the case of the IS department, these considerations are either non-existent or at least secondary to enabling collaboration, which has led to a successful implementation. My feeling is that MOSS will get there eventually, it’s just not there yet based on the cases I’ve seen.

Dave’s presentation and all other presentations will be posted on the AIIM website and I’ll provide a link when it becomes available.

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I attended the breakout sessions presented by Fujitsu and Kofax. Given that it’s standing-room-only in here, there seems to be a lot of interest in document imaging and how it relates to MOSS.

Fujitsu presented a single MOSS case study (an integration of Knowledge Lake Capture with MOSS for HR files at Build-a-Bear Workshop), but the rest of the session focused on the general business case for document imaging projects. While I personally agree with most of the business cases presented, it would have been nice to hear more about specific examples of MOSS and document imaging integrations. Of course, that could be tricky if there aren’t many (which I assume is the case only because MOSS is relatively new). Given that, it might have been good to hear more about how exactly Knowledge Lake Capture was integrated into MOSS and how (in general terms) MOSS was structured to accept many thousands of images.

Kofax provided a good overview of their application, a backend-agnostic document capture tool that can capture images from various sources (electronic or scanned paper) in either a centralized or distributed model, and even from MFPs. In terms of information related to a MOSS integration, there was very little offered in the way of specifics outside of mentioning that Kofax has a MOSS release script. I asked whether Kofax has any specific case studies they could share about document imaging in MOSS and the presenter noted that there are several on the Kofax website, including one about an organization that is scanning 60 million images a month into MOSS. I’ll track that down and include a link once I find it.

I’m a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more focus on document imaging related to MOSS, especially given that Kofax apparently has a case study on this exact topic. The background on Kofax was interesting, but I would expect that many attendees of a “SharePoint Meets ECM” session have at least a working knowledge of Kofax (and they can easily find out more if necessary). Recognizing that these sessions are time-constrained, I would have derived more value from a quick review of MOSS-specific case studies. That’s not to say that these sessions weren’t useful, just that they would be more valuable if there was more focus on MOSS.

Looks like the next session will focus squarely on MOSS. Dave Larson from Project Leadership Associates will present on the topic: “Has SharePoint Evolved into a Viable ECM Solution?” Should be interesting.

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