C3 Associates Inc.

*so long as I build out the required functionality myself.

Let me explain.

I attended a customer demonstration session today given by Elliot Gerard of General Mills, the good people who bring you Count Chocula cereal and the Pillsbury Dough Boy (getting hungry just thinking about it). They are long time SharePoint users dating back to the original “Tahoe” version in 2001 and have developed a significant amount of in-house expertise with the tool since that time. In addition, they have a good relationship with Microsoft and regularly share knowledge about SharePoint between their technical team and Microsoft’s experts.

The work that General Mills has done in SharePoint is nothing less than impressive. They have created pretty much everything I think is needed to fill some of the gaps in the application. For example, they’ve built in a unique SharePoint documnent ID structure that allows for persistent linking to documents in SharePoint libraries, created a really slick way of adding metadata when uploading multiple documents at one time and have built a custom records dispostion process that allows users to either delete or renew any documents that have passed their retention periods (the way they’ve handled the application of retention information in the first place is cool too, but too detailed to go into here). I suspect this is exactly the kind of work Microsoft was hoping would happen given the flexible development capacity of the tool. If the reaction from the reps ranging from large technology companies and airlines is any indication, Microsoft is going to face a fair bit of pressure to include many of the features General Mills has created in the next version of SharePoint.

The likelihood that some or all of this functionality will be baked into SharePoint’s vNext seems even higher given the intersting discussion I had with a couple of members of the SharePoint development team at the ‘Ask the Experts’ lunch. I felt a bit sorry for everyone wearing the bright white “Ask Me a Question, I’m an Expert!” t-shirts but I guess that falls into the category of “other duties as assigned” in the standard Microsoft employee agreement. But I digress. The guys I spoke with confirmed that some of the finer points of ECM are a bit new to the more senior people at Microsoft (see my last couple of blog posts for more examples of this) but they said that the level of understanding was growing. Their plan seemed to be to allow partners and customers to build out missing functionality to see what really is required by the end user community and that the best examples of these customizations will be included in future versions of the tool. No one was willing to commit to anything formally of course but I was left with a good indication that at least a few of the functions General Mills has built would be included in the next release (if not exactly the same, the basic concept will be there).

Now, before you go and accuse me of being anti-SharePoint (or pro-SharePoint, or pro- / anti-anything else) let me say that the approach Microsoft has taken is a sound one; allowing the user and developer communities to really drive the requirements for a tool in a real-world setting is a great idea. Some may look at this and say that the tool is half-baked, others would say it’s extremely flexible. Neither perspective is wrong. As I think I say at least every other post, it all depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. If it’s collaboration you’re after and you’ve got a couple of .NET rock stars in your stable, fill your boots with SharePoint. If you need to meet stringent regulatory requirements or get sued a lot, consider Documentum or Livelink. If you’ve got both scenarios at your organization, consider implementing both. Tools to connect SharePoint and other ECM apps are also maturing rapidly and hold the potential to create a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario, so hopefully everyone wins in the end.

Looking forward to seeing my family again tomorrow after what has been a long four days. It was definitely worthwhile to attend this event and Microsoft did their usual good job of keeping us well-fed and entertained. It will be interesting to see how things evolve with the product come this time next year.

Day 2 continued for me on the same basic theme as day 1. The focus of the sessions I attended seemed to be on communicating some of what I think are the basic tenets of implementing a strong ECM system. This general theme broke down into two areas:

Records Management – The session by Susan Cisco and Jonathan Brandenburg of the Gimmal Group focused on the implementation of a ‘big bucket’ theory of RM. Long story short, they discussed how organizations can align physical and electronic records management by reducing records classifications into about 100 ‘buckets’. I find this approach interesting in and of itself but the most entertaining part of the session was the response from some of the Microsoft partners and employees in the room, many of whom were obviously hearing about records management for the first time. The look on the face of a couple of people said it all; “You’re kidding me. You mean you can’t just keep everything forever? How about just destroying all of my email on a regular schedule. No? What!?” I even caught a couple of records managers in the room giggling gently to themselves. The whole thing was a bit comical; it reminded me of the movie Mars Attacks just before the aliens start zapping everyone.

The second area of focus was a suggested shift in mindset from a prescriptive ECM deployment approach to a more people-centric approach. Forrester analyst Kyle McNabb talked about the roots of ECM and used this as a jumping-off point to suggest that all the easy IT process automation has pretty much happened (for things like accounting month-end processing and customer relationship management) and that our next challenge is to enable people-centric collaboration. Interestingly, he used two of the three “C’s” in our name to illustrate his point, talking about context driving collaboration. I obviously agree with this point and it’s good to see that industry thinkers are taking this approach as well.

The distinction between process-centric and people-centric work may also shed some light on the differences between our records management friends and the Microsoft deployment community. Typical records-focused ECM implementations will often try to get users to change the way they work in order to classify content into one of the aforementioned buckets. McNabb’s perspective (and mine as well) is that RM classification needs to be embedded into an existing work practice perhaps even to the point that they don’t realize it’s going on. What I call the “subversive RM” strategy allows users to continue to work in a context meaningful to them while capturing critical records classification data based on the document library or folder in which the content is stored. If we can pull that off, perhaps we can get the aliens to holster those ray guns before things get messy.

I recently had the privilege of providing some input into an article on SharePoint’s impact on the Enterprise Content Management market written by Marvin Pyles of Key Analysis Research. You can find the article here.

I recently had the privilege of providing some input into an article on SharePoint’s impact on the Enterprise Content Management market written by Marvin Pyles of Key Analysis Research. You can find the article here.

I’m writing this as I sit in the final session of the first day of the 2008 SharePoint conference in rainy downtown Seattle. It’s been a big day and I definitely need a beer but I wanted to share some of my thoughts before I head for the pub.

My most important learning has been definitive confirmation that Microsoft takes a different view of ECM than traditional ECM vendors. The ‘tone from the top’ was set by Bill Gates himself in his opening keynote. He reiterated Microsoft’s focus on the end user as the primary goal of SharePoint and related applications. This vision manifests itself in the expectation that users should be able to own team sites in SharePoint. Here’s a quote from Bill to back this up which came as part of a discussion about the horizontal focus of SharePoint. He said that “you should just allow sites to spring up in a broad fashion”. In my experience, people who want to be successful in their organizations will follow the lead of their boss, which is why SharePoint works the way it does.

A further indication of Microsoft’s unique view of ECM is the fact that this conference is opposite the 2008 AIIM Conference, which tells me that Microsoft is either deliberately trying to draw attendees from that event or simply didn’t realize that AIIM was going on at the same time. It’s probably the latter but either way, to me this is an indication that Microsoft sees SharePoint as more than an ECM application tasked with managing documents and other unstructured content. Bill Gates talked about SharePoint as the place that workers will go to access all of the information they need to do their jobs. This includes documents, structured data from line-of-business applications like CRM systems, tasks, and information about other people. By definition, a platform that is intended to give users the power to create ad hoc information structures is a platform that’s difficult to control. To make up for this, a big focus of this conference is how SharePoint deployment team can reign in the application before it gets out of control.

I am not saying any of this is a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably a very good thing because the vast majority of business use cases are inherently ad hoc. What it tells me, however, is that there are a few very clear use cases that are best supported by traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum, etc. My last blog post discussed the differences in approach and application two of my clients are taking based on the use cases they are trying to address and the tool they are using. To cut a long story short, Livelink is being used to manage a highly controlled process where SharePoint is the platform of choice for a more collaborative process. The analysts in attendance at this conference seem to agree with this (probably to the chagrin of most of the Microsoft personnel in the room), when they universally discounted the records management capabilities of SharePoint and suggested that it is not even in the same ballpark as existing RM tools. I’m not sure that’s true, but there is some legitimacy to saying that a tool that’s only had RM capabilities for a year can’t be considered as robust as applications that have been around for 15+ years.

Finally, I’ve noticed an interesting convergence between the Microsoft approach to ECM and the response by traditional ECM vendors to the emergence of social networking in the enterprise. Open Text announced Livelink ECM – Extended Collaboration at the AIIM conference today. The tool is intended to bring a free-form collaboration layer to the Livelink platform. Here’s a brief synopsis from the news release:

…[the tool] encourages people to work together, while capturing critical project information in an underlying ECM framework. Security, access control, and retention policies are strictly enforced using the native security mechanisms already in place, without adding another administrative layer.

The question organizations have to ask is whether they think a platform rooted in strong records management and content governance (like Livelink) that adds on a collaborative layer is more likely to meet their needs than is a collaborative platform (like SharePoint) that builds out content governance features over time. I don’t have a short answer to which approach is better. I suppose the best I can do is to give you the stock consultant’s response: it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Over time, we also need to consider whether SharePoint will truly dominate the space or whether there will continue to be room for applications like Livelink to continue to provide strong records management and compliance requirements even if the presentation layer ultimately becomes SharePoint. My guess is that’s exactly how things will evolve over the next decade or so. Let’s chat again in 2018 to see if I’m right.

There will be a lot to blog about over the next couple of days and I look forward to seeing if my perspective changes while here.