C3 Associates

I’m back from Vancouver and my presentation to Project World. It was a good event and well-attended by people from throughout Western Canada and the Pacific North West.

My presentation stimulated a lot of interesting discussion (well, interesting if you’re a PM or ECM enthusiast). Here’s a link to the presentation. Questions or comments are welcome.

I’ve got an upcoming speaking engagement on October 28 at the ProjectWorld Vancouver conference. My topic is “ECM Rescue - Picking up the Pieces from a Failed Implementation”. I’m excited about the opportunity to share some of my experiences in “rescuing” suboptimal ECM implementations and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot while I’m there as well. You can find out more about the event here. Hope to see some of you there.

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.