C3 Associates ECM Blog » ECM Market

Things I Learned about ECM on My Summer Vacation

Greg Clark — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:27:26 +0000

As I recover from a too-short summer and get back into the full swing of things at work, I thought I would summarize a few things I learned about records and information management on my summer vacation.

The conclusion I draw is that while SharePoint is clearly having an impact on the ECM market (in addition to the fact that it is the fastest growing server product in Microsoft history, esteemed organizations like AIIM have started to dedicate entire communities to SharePoint), at this point it appears that SharePoint's success has not come at the expense of incumbent vendors. It will be interesting to see how this evolves but for now, it seems like there is room enough for everyone.

And just to continue the earlier trend of putting SharePoint into the mix of all ECM discussions, there was a great debate on the AIIM ERM Community blog this summer about the merits of SharePoint records management. James Lappin feels there are significant shortcomings in SharePoint records management, Mike Alsup disagrees.

Traditional ECM remains strong even as SharePoint rises. It seems that everyone (myself included) has been talking about the impact of SharePoint on the ECM space, and SharePoint's influence is undeniable. Many analysts, consultants, customers and even casual observers have been predicting that SharePoint will eventually become the de-facto standard ECM application at the cost of market share and license revenue for traditional ECM players. Then along comes Open Textand the aannouncement of their results for fiscal 2010. Total revenue is up 16% and profit increased 24%. That doesn't sound like a company on its way to irrelevance.
Records Management still matters. Even though most of the hype in our industry seems to be reserved for trends like Enterprise 2.0, open source, and the impact of cloud computing on ECM, enabling proper records management is still a big part of the value proposition for ECM. Nothing brings this fact into sharper focus than the mountains of electronic and paper records that will be produced as part of the investigationand lawsuits related to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The future of ECM is cloudy (and Cloudy?). It is natural and healthy for any industry to take stock of where it is in its' evolution, and the ECM industry seems better than most at navel gazing. Joe Shepley published a good piece on his vision for Second Wave ECMand AIIM's fearless leader John Mancini shares his thoughts in a recent YouTube video. There are enormous opportunities in ECM (cloud computing, continued data proliferation, Enterprise 2.0) and significant challenges, including significant debate on the definition of Enterprise Content Management itself. John Mancini says that "ECM as a term is stressed", which tells me that even AIIM is thinking about the future of this acronym.

Others are also debating the definition of ECM. Laurence Hart, though his Word of Pie blog, has been trying to come up with a new definition for ECM for several years now. His most recent attempt to define ECM was last week and it has spawned some interesting discussion in his blog comments. I'm always up for a good debate and this discussion has me thinking. Should ECM include both structured and unstructured information? Should it include web content? How about reusable chunks of content that can be used to pull together documents (e.g. standard paragraphs for a contract)? Tweets? Facebook pages? Just good old fashioned documents?

I don't have a good answer (okay, I don't have a short answer) to these questions but I suspect you probably have an opinion, which I encourage you to share below.

Enterprise Content Management at a Crossroads – The Case for Traditional ECM in a Microsoft World (Part 1 of 2)

Greg Clark — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:22:42 +0000

After death and taxes, there are two other things in this world that seem to be a certainty;

If you want to start a debate in the enterprise content management (ECM) community mention SharePoint, and;
I’m really bad at predictions.

Evidence for point #1 is all over ECM blogs, countless conversations at conferences like AIIM and ARMA, and countless sleepless nights for traditional ECM vendors as they try to think of ways to fend off Microsoft. As for the second point, let’s just say that after I picked my Calgary Flames to win the Stanley Cup they missed the playoffs entirely. Nice call on that one.

The purpose of this post is to list some of the reasons why traditional ECM tools might survive (or even thrive) in the face of Microsoft’s full-court-press into the ECM space. I will leave it up to you, my colleagues in the Electronic Records Management (ERM) community, to expand on this list, tell me where you disagree and have a good discussion about the future of Enterprise Content Management. Next week I will make the case why SharePoint might be the future of ECM.

So, here goes.

Records Management is not optional. Many organizations wish it was, but it isn’t. Although SharePoint 2007 introduced some records management capabilities and SharePoint 2010 seems to take this to the next level, the critical role records management plays within an organization means it is not something that can or should be done half way. Traditional ECM tools like EMC Documentum, Open Text Content Server (formerly Livelink), Open Text eDocs (formerly Hummingbird), IBM FileNet and open source tools like Alfresco have a several-year head start on Microsoft. This means there is a significant body of best practice built up within the vendor and partner channels associated with each tool. There is a very good chance the issue your organization is dealing with has been seen somewhere else and that you can call on these resources to help get you where you need to go. Can you say that about SharePoint RM? The tool and best practices may eventually develop, but do you want to go first?
The vertical is steeper than you think. Whenever a client or colleague would ask whether I thought SharePoint 2007 was a viable replacement for their existing ECM system, it was relatively straightforward to explain why most organizations needed to continue leveraging their existing investments in traditional ECM suites. I summarized some the shortcomings of SharePoint 2007 last year, and have found these points to be a very useful “elevator pitch” when discussing the differences between SharePoint 2007 and traditional ECM suites. Admittedly, this discussion gets as lot more muddled with SharePoint 2010. Many if not all of these points have been addressed in one form or another, except for one very important area; solid, mature solutions in industry verticals. ECM vendors have spent the better part of the past two decades developing, deploying, supporting and improving their solutions for specific industries. Will the life sciences industry trust their complex regulatory approval process to SharePoint any time soon? Will the architecture, engineering and construction industry be able to manage multi-billion dollar projects that generate millions of AutoCAD files and tens of millions of facility tags in SharePoint? Speaking in strictly technical terms it is possible that SharePoint can handle the volumes, but for these use cases and others like them, ECM suites offer mature tools that support complex business processes and as above, the vendor professional services and partner networks have extensive experience in implementing these tools in a variety of industry verticals. Although there is a perception that ECM should primarily focus on replacing shared drives, my suspicion is that most ECM is targeted at solving business problems in core operating areas, and it is in these areas that traditional ECM players hold a significant advantage.
A suite of tools from one vendor increases accountability. Whenever someone questions the ability of SharePoint to meet a particular business need using the product as-is out of the box (as is often the case when discussing the vertical business requirements noted above), the response is usually that a Microsoft partner either has or will provide a module that meets this need. While that may be true in many cases, most organizations end up with many different modules from many different vendors. There are a couple of downsides to this; the testing required each time you need to upgrade goes up exponentially and, if and when things do go wrong you will not be able to hold a single vendor to account. This is often referred to as the “one throat to choke” argument (although my friends in the vendor community prefer to call it the “one back to pat” argument). Although the “suite” approach taken by traditional ECM vendors usually means that some of the individual components are not best of breed, the ability to hold a single vendor to account for their product is a significant benefit, and one that SharePoint cannot offer.
If Microsoft CRM didn’t kill SAP, why would SharePoint kill traditional ECM? Although there has been a lot of talk about SharePoint overtaking traditional ECM players, why has Microsoft not overtaken SAP in the CRM space? Is there is a case to be made that SharePoint is akin to Microsoft’s CRM offering; a tool targeted at the mid-market, mass-market space but not really suitable for true enterprise deployment?

I hope these questions provide a good starting point for a good discussion about the future of ECM. Next Thursday I will make the case for SharePoint to live up to the hype and change the ECM landscape as we know it.

Until then look forward to your comments.

Cross-posted from my blog on the AIIM ERM Expert User Community.

Eight Reasons SharePoint 2010 Looks Like a True ECM System

Greg Clark — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:27:52 +0000

With the release of SharePoint 2010 in beta and the anticipated production release sometime in the first half of 2010 (one source says it will be released late in Q1 but that’s a full-blown rumor, so don’t hold me to that), it is time to provide an update on the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s collaboration/content management/business intelligence/portal/ECM/records management tool.

In an earlier post I listed Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System, and, at first glance the new version looks very encouraging from an ECM perspective. As I’ve said before, I get excited by anything that can help my clients better manage their information and SharePoint has the potential to be a transformative platform bridging structured content, unstructured content and social computing in one flexible package. SharePoint 2007 does a decent job of this but it has some deficiencies when it comes to managing all content in the enterprise.

I’ll also give you the same caveat I gave last time; While this post focuses on SharePoint as a technology, technology is about the very last thing that should be considered when an organization sets out to manage its content more efficiently. Information management should start with a good business case, appropriate sponsorship, choosing the right areas of focus then building capacity within the organization to truly succeed. Technology is only the last piece of this puzzle. All of that said, there has been an incredible amount of interest in SharePoint (as illustrated by the 7,500 people who attended the SharePoint conference from October 19 to 22, 2009) and many of my clients have questions about where (or whether) this tool should fit into their ECM strategy.

Finally, the updates below are based on my attendance at the SharePoint conference where I went to as many breakout sessions as possible and chased down beleaguered Microsoft staffers to ask questions in what must have felt like a trip to the old Roman Coliseum (with the lions, not with Caesar). I tried to focus on attending ECM-specific sessions and have done as much reading as I can but as a vendor-neutral consultant Microsoft hasn’t seen fit to furnish C3 Associates with a pre-beta version of SharePoint 2010, so I haven’t actually used the system myself. As always we will continue to learn as much as we can about all of the ECM tools and technologies that are of interest to our clients but in the absence of actually working with SharePoint some of our understanding will be incomplete or possibly incorrect. I will provide updates in future posts as I learn more.

I have used a five point scale to evaluate the how well I think SharePoint 2010 meets my “Eight Things” criteria for inclusion into the ECM club. Remember that these are based on only my first look at the tool and are subject to revision as I learn more about how the new features and functions actually work.

Initial Ranking Scale

5 – Feature exists
4 – Feature exists with some minor shortcomings
3 – Feature exists but doesn’t satisfy all use cases
2 – Feature may exist but satisfies only a narrow use case or feature does not exist but can be created through a customization
1 – Feature does not exist

With all of that out of the way here are the eight reasons I think Microsoft has moved towards a more complete ECM solution.

1. Persistent links – The single biggest shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send content via a link rather than relying on email attachments. In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the repository. In SharePoint 2007, links break if you rename or move a file. The other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document.

SharePoint 2010 Update: Yes, they’ve finally done it; Document ID provides absolute reference to objects regardless of file renames or content moves. Doc IDs have a default format that’s alphanumeric (eg: FCHGRTB1209309 or something like that) but this can be configured to use whatever format you want. There is a possible “gotcha” here in that this can be turned on or off on a site collection level (I don’t know if it is defaulted on or off) and this could cause issues if it is inconsistently applied; you also need to think through what your numbering protocol will be and take steps to ensure you don’t create duplicate document IDs. One open question is whether each version of a document has it’s own unique ID, allowing links to specific versions.

Initial Rating: 4

2. Store once, use many – SharePoint 2007 had a nasty habit of copying content throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth (because content links might break as noted above). Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in SharePoint is the “Send to…Records Center” feature where a copy of a document is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the document to indicate its changed status (see point 3 for more on the RM capabilities of SharePoint).

SharePoint 2010 Update: This concept seems to have made its way into SharePoint 2010, although it doesn’t seem that Microsoft has fully embraced this concept. The new records management capabilities of SharePoint allow records to be managed in place (locking declared records so they cannot be changed) , copying records to a records center or moving the file but leaving a link behind (for more on records management see the next point). However, the ability to create a “document set”, where selected content is added into a new object type that is managed separately still relies on copies of content moving into the new object rather than links. There are likely some legitimate use cases for this feature; gathering documents for disposition or a legal hold, but I get nervous any time a system wants to copy content rather than link it to a source document.

Initial Rating: 4

3. Honest-to-goodness Records Management – I recognize that that SharePoint 2007 is DoD 5015.2 certified but the statement from the product development team that the DoD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers…who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to efficiently manage physical objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it to partners.

SharePoint 2010 Update: As I hinted above, Microsoft appears to have made some significant strides towards the including true records management capabilities in SharePoint 2010. It leverages the persistent linking capabilities to enable in-place management of records and takes advantage of the contextual ribbon user interface inherited from the Office 2007 / 2010 suite to allow authorized users to declare records. Perhaps most importantly, SharePoint 2010 allows for the creation of hierarchical file plans. The system leverages the greatly-improved connection to the underlying SQL Server 2008 database to allow for the creation of lists that run to the millions of items; handy (necessary) if you want to manage physical objects on any sort of scale.

SharePoint 2010 records management likely isn’t going to replace traditional ECM applications when it comes to meeting stringent compliance requirements and I suspect this is where these vendors will focus their “embrace and extend” strategies when it comes to SharePoint. Although Microsoft says industry standards like DoD 5015 and MoReq were considered when the RM capabilities were designed, I doubt very much that organizations with strong requirements in this area will find that SharePoint 2010 meets their needs and I also suspect that this the current incarnation of records management in SharePoint 2010 is about as far as Microsoft will take this capability.

Initial Rating: 3

SharePoint 2010 Update: On of the most impressive features of the new SharePoint is the introduction of Managed Metadata Services, which allows administrators to centrally manage metadata and share it anywhere in the SharePoint farm (across many site collections). Microsoft has done a nice job of including “folksonomy” tagging capabilities alongside traditional managed metadata lists. This means that users can add their own tags or keywords to documents (pre-filled with suggested key words both from the official metadata library and based on what other users have done like a YouTube or Google search). While this is configurable on an attribute-by-attribute basis, when enabled it looks to be a very useful way of refining the metadata model over time based on user input because administrators have the ability to add popular user-created tags into the formal managed taxonomy.

Initial Rating: 5

5. Reusable search templates and stored search results – There is no question that search is a focus for Microsoft based on their acquisition of FAST and their push into public internet search with the recent launch of Bing. Search in SharePoint 2007 is reasonably good but the tool does not have the ability to either store a “snapshot” of search results for future reference nor does SharePoint 2007 allow users to create reusable search templates. This feature would save users time by allowing them to create a search query then either re-execute that query in the future or add new criteria without having to rebuild the entire search.

SharePoint 2010 Update: One thing I can say for sure; FAST takes SharePoint search to another level. FAST brings some of the best of internet search to the enterprise, allowing users to filter searches based on slider bars common to e-commerce websites and metadata search appears to be both faster and more comprehensive given the closer connection to the SQL Server database. Although I don’t know the licensing model for SharePoint 2010, I strongly suspect that FAST is licensed separately and is likely a relatively expensive add-on. In terms of whether this gets SharePoint 2010 where it needs to be in relation to some of the search capabilities of other ECM tools is unclear at this point, but Microsoft has clearly advanced in this area.

Initial Rating: 4

6. More granular security – This is one area where SharePoint was already reasonably strong but truly deep ECM systems include advanced security features like the ability to deny permission to certain objects on an as-needed basis. The current process for managing security is a bit cumbersome but I expect this is something Microsoft is working on. It will be interesting to see if what changes, if any, make it into the final release of the product.

SharePoint 2010 Update: The security model in SharePoint 2010 appears to be fundamentally the same as in SharePoint 2007. Additional security parameters can be set using the latest SharePoint Admin Toolkit and this is an area where SharePoint didn’t need a huge amount of improvement anyway. As my colleague John Meilleur pointed out, you have to be careful what you wish for when applying security; too much granularity or breaking the inheritance model can lead to administrative headaches.

Initial Rating: 4

7. Surface the audit trail – One of the things I like the best about established ECM applications is the ability to see who has opened my documents. I find this particularly handy on status report day when I inevitably discover that I’ve made a mistake in the document I’ve just sent out (as an unbreakable persistent link of course). I can check the audit trail to see if anyone has opened the document and if not, make my changes without anyone knowing I’d messed up in the first place. While SharePoint tracks most major audit events, the list of events is not as extensive as in a traditional ECM application nor is this information surfaced through the function menu of the content object.

SharePoint 2010 Update: This is one area where Microsoft appears to have not caught up with traditional ECM vendors. In all of the sessions I attended and in all of the demonstrations I have seen to date SharePoint 2010 doesn’t seem to have surfaced the audit trail in the function menu. In SharePoint 2007 some events are logged but not all; files opened in the browser don’t necessarily trigger a “view” event where MS Office files do when opened using “Edit In Microsoft Office xxxx”. It isn’t immediately clear whether this issue has been addressed in SharePoint 2010 but I hope a closer inspection of our brand new Beta install will answer this question. Audit information can be added to the function menu of a document by applying some relatively simple custom code or you can buy a third-party application but again, any customizations or vendor modules need to be managed and these costs add up.

Initial Rating: 2

8. More and more mature line-of-business integrations – This should be a strength of SharePoint given the sizeable .NET developer community as well as the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem, but SharePoint still has a lot of catching up to do in this area. Organizations deploying SharePoint won’t be able to hold a single vendor to account for a series of modules (or Content Enabled Vertical Applications, as Gartner likes to call them). This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective but established ECM vendors have offerings that satisfy a variety of industry verticals and business functions. To achieve the same thing with SharePoint customers will need to research, purchase and deploy modules from a variety of Microsoft partners. CMS Watch offers a good summary of the issues associated with third party add-ons for SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 Update: This is still an issue with SharePoint 2010 and will continue to be given the way that Microsoft relies on its partners to extend its products. There were over 200 partner exhibits at the 2009 SharePoint conference and countless hundreds more beyond this so it is likely that most content management scenarios can be met through the purchase of a vendor add-on but as before this adds to the complexity of a SharePoint deployment and increases the total cost of ownership of SharePoint, likely to a point not that different from the prices charged by traditional ECM vendors.

Initial Rating: 2

To sum up, it is clear that SharePoint will continue to have a significant impact on the ECM landscape. The question is whether the functional improvements evident in SharePoint 2010 mean that organizations with significant commitments to other ECM platforms have to start all over again with SharePoint? In the short term, I think the answer is no. In many cases, the true benefit from the investments made in traditional ECM can be realized by surfacing some of this content though SharePoint interfaces; done well this can significantly enhance the user experience while still ensuring that the strong compliance engine in your existing ECM system keeps your content safe and your CEO out of jail.

I suspect that any changes in the ECM world will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. SharePoint is a disruptive technology to be sure, but given it’s breadth, relative lack of maturity and a widely varied partner community Microsoft will help the overall ECM market grow and likely take established ECM vendors with it. As they (used to) say on Wall Street, a rising tide floats all boats.

This is not to say that things will be easy for the makes of FileNet, Documentum, Livelink and others; they have a significant challenge ahead in trying to position their products not relative to one another, but relative to SharePoint (whether they like it or not). The vendors that do this well will continue to thrive and any that choose to ignore SharePoint or do not recognize the significance of the changes in SharePoint 2010 could be in trouble.

As always I appreciate your feedback on anything you read here. Feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a note via my Twitter account at GregClarkC3.

C3 Associates Article Top AIIM Post of 2009

Greg Clark — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:49:58 +0000

Our blog post “Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System” was the most popular post of 2009 on AIIM President John Mancini’s Digital Landfill blog. Thanks to John and the AIIM team for all of their support this year. Thanks to them and the hard work of the Calgary ECM community, the 2009 Calgary AIIM conference was a big success and proves once again that information management is alive and well in Calgary.

I’m working on an update to my SharePoint 2010 post based on what I’ve learned since it was released in beta this fall. Look for that post early in new year. Until then, I wish all of my readers the best of the season and a fantastic 2010!

Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to Be a True ECM System

Greg Clark — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:05:18 +0000

The hype cycle has started for the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 and I’m certainly not the only one to get caught up in it. I’m excited about anything that can help my clients better manage their information and I’ve always seen SharePoint as a potentially transformative platform bridging structured content, unstructured content and social computing in one flexible package. The current release of SharePoint does a decent job of this but in my opinion and the opinions of others (here and here) it has some shortcomings when it comes to its capabilities as a true Enterprise Content Management platform.

While this post is all about SharePoint as a technology, I want to be clear that technology is about the very last thing that should be considered when implementing ECM. It should start with a good business case, appropriate sponsorship, choosing the right areas of focus then building capacity within the organization to truly succeed with ECM. Technology is only the last piece of this puzzle. All of that said, there has been an incredible amount of interest in SharePoint and many of my clients have questions about where (or whether) this tool should fit into their ECM strategy.

For SharePoint 2010 to become the ECM category killer and truly threaten the market share of Open Text, EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet and others, the new version should have the following eight things:

1. Persistent links – I’ve told anyone who would listen over the past two years (and many people who wouldn’t…hi mom!) that the single biggest shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send content via a link rather than relying on email attachments. In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the repository. In SharePoint links will break if you rename or move a file. The other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document. Rumor has it that SharePoint 2010 will include persistent linking and if it does the tool will have taken a big step forward.

2. Store once, use many – SharePoint has a nasty habit of copying content throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth (because content links might break as noted above). Yes, yes, I know that you can “Send to…Other Location” and link that new doc back to the original but this linkage is easy to break and experience tells me that the content falls out of synch very quickly. Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in SharePoint is the “Send to…Records Center” feature where a copy of a document is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the document to indicate its changed status (see the next point for more on the RM capabilities of SharePoint). The propagation of copies of documents throughout a repository is very bad mojo from an ECM and records management perspective and it is something that Microsoft must fix if SharePoint is going to replace traditional ECM applications.

3. Honest-to-goodness Records Management – I recognize that that SharePoint 2007 is DoD 5015.2 certified but the statement from the product development team that the DoD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers…who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to manage physical objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it to partners.

4. Better metadata management – Metadata in SharePoint 2007 took a quantum leap forward with the introduction of Content Types. However, managing metadata in SharePoint 2007 can be difficult especially when dealing with multiple site collections. An ECM system should be able to easily manage relationships between data in the form of cascading attributes and parent-child relationships throughout the entire repository and should also support inheritance of metadata from the container level (eg. folder) to the content within that container. I’m hopeful that we’ll see improvements to the SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) that make this possible. The other option appears to be Microsoft’s Master Data Management tool (codenamed “Bulldog”) which is rumoured to be included in SharePoint 2010.

It will be interesting to see whether SharePoint 2010 includes some or all of these features. Microsoft has done a good job of capturing a new market without significantly eroding the market share of traditional ECM vendors; as SharePoint adoption has increased the overall market has grown and, as they say on Wall Street, “a rising tide floats all boats.” Whether Microsoft’s ship will sail away from the rest remains to be seen (as does my ability to stretch a bad metaphor) but they were clearly not able to do so with SharePoint 2007.

As I learn more about SharePoint 2010 I will share my thoughts here and on Twitter (GregClarkC3). I also plan to attend the 2009 SharePoint Conference this coming October where I’m sure I’ll find out more. In the meantime I’d appreciate any feedback, additional information or opinions you have to share about SharePoint 2010 or ECM in general.

A special thanks to C3 Principal John Meilleur and C3 Associates Ankur Gupta and Lam Huynh for sharing their expertise in the creation of this article.

AIIM Day 2 – Presentation Posted and Brief Summary of Day 2

Greg Clark — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:31:22 +0000

Just back from my presentation and it seemed to be well received by those in attendance. I certainly had a good time. Thanks to everyone who showed up at 4:45 on a wet Wednesday afternoon to hear me talk about my experience “rescuing” failed ECM implementations. I was particularly impressed by the excellent questions throughout; most of the attendees seemed to have had varying levels of success implementing ECM (from total failure to a reasonable amount of success: I’m very pleased to report that the organization that seemed to be most successful was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which will certainly help me sleep at night).

You can find a copy of the presentation here.

Day 2 Summary

The day started with a series of keynote speeches. The most interesting was from Andrew Lippman, founding director of the MIT Media Laboratory. He talked about the “cracks” forming in institutions (he used banks as an example, but says the example can apply to many / most organizations) as a result of four things:

1) Inability to scale – Things that work well when an organization is small don’t usually work well when they get too big. Ethics comes to mind here.

2) Monocultures – Tribes of political beasts roam through most large organizations limiting its ability to thrive.

3) Opacity – Because of the first two points, it becomes difficult to understand exactly what’s going and innovation tends to be stifled.

4) Blurred mission – Organizations forget why they existed in the first place and start to exist only to sustain themselves.

His solution to these issues is “living content” generated by networks of people working from a common platform to build what they need. He suggested that building applications that constrain users to work a certain way is outdated and will be eclipsed by (social) networks and common platforms.

Extending this to an ECM example, I see this broadly as the approach Microsoft has taken with MOSS; although it is a proprietary server-based application its extensibility has attracted a large developer community who are busily building custom Web Parts that integrate nicely into the SharePoint platform. Although traditional ECM vendors have a similar model, theirs is closed and limited only to official partners whereas anyone with some .NET skills can spin up a web part and get to work.

The open source folks may disagree with me that SharePoint is a true platform but it is certainly more so than the traditional ECM applications on offer. This is not the death knell for traditional ECM but more of a shot across the bow that they too will likely need to open up to survive in the brave new networked world.

Enough thinking and more drinking! I’m off to the pub to talk ECM (or not) with my conference colleagues. As always, comments are welcome.

More details about CMIS and even an integration

Greg Clark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:42:36 +0000

Andrew Chapman has provided a good summary of what we can expect from the new Content Management Interopoerability Services (CMIS) standard. I like the way he’s broken down the impact of CMIS into a series of “what’s in it for me” statements.

He’s only off on one small point. His prediction that it will take three to five years for CMIS to see the light of day in a real live production environment is off by about three to five years. John Newton at Alfresco (one of the driving forces behind CMIS) announced the world’s first CMIS integration today on his blog.

You can just tell how excited John is about the potential for CMIS to be a true game-changer in ECM. He speaks to one of the questions I’ve been mulling over; how is CMIS different than JSR-170, ODMA, WebDav and other ECM “standards”? In brief, CMIS has the backing of all of the big players in ECM from both the open source and proprietary software worlds. While this is not unprecedented it’s certainly rare, and as someone who strives to help organizations succeed with ECM I can see only good things coming from this.

Interoperability, SharePoint and the Future of ECM

Greg Clark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:33:47 +0000

There’s been an interesting convergence of opinion pieces and hard news over the past 24 hours that speak to the future of Enterprise Content Management as we know it. I know that sounds a bit melodramatic but I sense that we’re in the midst of a seismic shift in the way organizations view ECM applications and the way vendors are providing those applications.

Yesterday, Matt Asay of CNet compared the recenty hype about Google’s Chrome browser to the quiet (or maybe not so quiet if you’ve been paying attention to the ECM blogosphere) reality of SharePoint’s massive expansion within the enterprise. His suggestion that Google has a long way to go to grab the attention of corporate IT groups and displace Microsoft is an understatement to say the least. He goes on to say that the trick for Google and others is to focus on interoperability if they have any hope of challenging SharePoint.

Matt is either incredibly astute or just plain lucky because it looks like Microsoft and friends have beaten Google to that punch as well. Today, Microsoft, EMC and IBM, supported by other key ECM vendors including Open Text, Alfresco, SAP and Oracle announced the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard (see also the Yahoo Finance article on this).

At this point in the history of ECM, I think Google Chrome and Google Sites are just noise from an enterprise point of view. Until we see significant adoption in the real world and some acknowledgement from Google that content has a lifecycle, I’m not going to consider Google tools as part of the ECM equation.

And that equation, in my mind, includes both collaboration and control. All true ECM tools enable both but each tool does some things better than others. Traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum and FileNet are very strong when it comes to controlling content but have not been noted for their ease-of-use when it comes to collaboration. SharePoint, on the other hand, is not the first choice amongst the records management community but provides arguably the best enterprise-ready collaboration platform on the market.

Which brings me back to the CMIS Standard.

My first impression about the impact CMIS will have in the ECM market is that it validates what I’ve been saying for a while. SharePoint will not be the video that kills ECM’s radio stars (hands up all you Buggles fans; be honest). CMIS allows organizations to legitimately pursue an “all of the above” ECM strategy and removes any impediments they may have in deploying SharePoint to supplement an existing ECM application. At the same time, traditional ECM vendors will continue to survive and thrive as they support content that requires more rigorous controls.

Ultimately, as the news release announcing the CMIS standard says, this should be all about the customer. Of course we all know that vendors don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s clearly something in it for them as well. Here’s hoping that the CMIS standard will help break down barriers to successful content management by providing the best of both collaboration and control to the benefit of everyone.

Open Text Keeps Their Stick on the Ice

Greg Clark — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:52:52 +0000

Open Text Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Jenkins was featured in an extensive article in the July 21 edition of the Globe and Mail. You can find the article along with an audio interview here.

In addition to several hockey references that underscore the company’s Canadian roots, Jenkins made a couple of interesting comments about the “acquire or be acquired” nature of the software business. Let’s just say he didn’t do anything to dispel the speculation that Open Text will someday be acquired. At the same time, I think he didn’t take enough credit for the good work Open Text has done to become (and remain) Canada’s largest software company. He put a lot of it down to luck and also the ability to operate in relative obscurity due to the overwhelming success of Research in Motion (the makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, in case you didn’t know).

In my mind, Open Text has done a good job of positioning its technology to address a growing need while at the same time marketing well. The supposed “threat” to Open Text posed by SharePoint has yet to materialize and as the market comes to better understand how each of the products are positioned it seems even less likely that SharePoint will erode Open Text’s market share. Open Text’s “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” strategy seems to be working. We’re certainly seeing a lot of interest in hybrid solutions (using both Livelink and SharePoint) here in Calgary and I imagine that is likely the case elsewhere as well.

New Article About SharePoint’s Impact on ECM

Greg Clark — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:20:49 +0000

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.