C3 Associates Inc.

As I get ready to head off to Seattle for next week’s SharePoint conference I’m struck by how different my mindset will be from the recent Livelink work I’ve been doing. In Livelink, organizations are able to create highly controlled document management scenarios for things like engineering drawing management and records management. This is supported by rich and relatively mature vertical applications that can be tuned to a specific organization’s requirements (although they work pretty well out of the box).

Looking at the sessions I’ll be attending next week the focus is decidedly more on collaboration and ease of use. And even where sessions address issues like RM or high-volume document management, the tone seems to suggest that they’re just getting started in these areas, which, in fact, they are. This isn’t a negative thing; I’m personally very excited by Microsoft’s interest and commitment to the ECM space.

As I’ve said before, Microsoft takes a very different approach to ECM than traditional vendors like Open Text. The focus of SharePoint is on enabling Information Workers to work collaboratively and, by extension, expose more of an organization’s information to formal management practices like records management. Traditional vendors take largely the opposite approach, focusing primarily on controlling information with collaboration an outcome of good information management. This may seem like a subtle difference but it’s an important one. I hasten to add that it doesn’t mean you can manage records in SharePoint or that Livelink has no collaborative capabilities. Far from it; each has an offering in both areas and can meet certain business scenarios that include both formal document management and ad hoc collaboration. If your organization is considering which ECM tool (or tools) are right for you, my recommendation is to identify what problem you’re setting out to solve today and in the future. If compliance and control are your focus, consider Livelink or another traditional ECM application; if you’re looking to enable collaboration across your organization and / or you do a lot of project work, take a close look at SharePoint.

All of this said I look forward to learning more about real-world SharePoint implementations and also about Microsoft’s future direction for the product and will happily share what I learn with all of you. I’m also curious about your perspective on this question so please feel free to leave a comment.

Andrew Chapman has started a great series on the options and considerations when integrating traditional ECM systems like Documentum, Livelink, etc. into SharePoint. Here’s a link to an overview of his seven reference architectures for integrating SharePoint with traditional ECM systems. He’s also created a handy reference architecture organizer so we can keep tabs on all of his detailed posts as they happen.

This is great stuff and captures the two main options our clients have been exploring. For us, we’ve had the most success with architectures number two or three. Chapman’s architecture number two is a loosely coupled solution where critical content is moved from SharePoint to the traditional ECM system and three is using SharePoint as the portal container, where a custom web part displays content from the ECM repository. Documentum and Livelink ECM eDOCS (aka the ex Hummingbird DM) users interested in pursuing this option might want to consider the web parts available from SeeUnity, which we’ve had some success with.