C3 Associates

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.

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.

The Principals of C3 have been having a bit of a debate as to whether Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 can be considered a true ECM system. Obviously Microsoft thinks it is as they’ve branded the tool as such. But others like Gartner disagree, calling it Basic Content Services rather than a full-blown ECM tool. So who’s right?

There’s a school of thought that says while MOSS is a huge step forward from SharePoint 2003, it still has too many shortcomings to be considered a true ECM suite. These include a lack of vertical applications for things like SOX compliance and CAD drawing management (for now, anyway), no ability to send a persistent link to an object, no end user-accessible audit trail, and the fact that the default RM functionality is to copy a document to the records center while leaving the original file behind.

It’s hard to disagree with this; these are all true when using SharePoint out of the box. There’s no question that Open Text Livelink, EMC Documentum, IBM / FileNet or any of the other established “pure play” ECM tools provide this functionality as part of their base offerings, and a whole lot more. There are a couple of good articles in this month’s AIIM eDOC magazine that examine the issue of exactly how SharePoint measures up to traditional ECM tools; What’s the Deal with Basic Content Services by Janelle Julien and the second half of a detailed examination of SharePoint by Mike Alsup. I encourage you to have a look.

As for my take on this, like any good consultant I’ll say the answer is “it depends”. I personally wouldn’t trust my SOX audit to a v1.0 RM tool like SharePoint. That isn’t to say it isn’t up to the job, I’d just rather let someone else go first. SharePoint also wouldn’t be my first choice as a back-end repository for highly structured documents that are part of a well-established business process like AP scanning and workflow. Again, I have no doubt that SharePoint will get there eventually, but I’m not confident that it can scale to handle the load of tens of thousands of invoices a month. Established ECM tools can do this before most of us have finished our first cup of coffee.

Where I see SharePoint playing a prominent role is as an ad-hoc collaborative tool. Its ease of use and tight Office integration is an area where most ECM tools can’t keep up. SharePoint is intended to work the way the worker works, allowing them to use familiar tools to structure information in a way that makes sense in their world. These are things that make MOSS the leading BCS tool, but many of the new features available in SharePoint 2007 mean that it is on the road to becoming a true ECM application. While RM in SharePoint is brand new, experience tells me that Microsoft doesn’t do things half-way. The tool will mature and will likely meet 80% of the needs of 80% of organizations, with the missing 20% of functionality added in by the very large developer community out there. I’m certain this is how the document-copy issue noted above will be addressed, along with most other functional gaps.

The issue for any organization considering an enterprise MOSS deployment today is whether they’re willing to endure the bumps that come from deploying software that is still in its formative stages. It is also very important to understand the problem an organization is trying to solve with an ECM solution; if your goal is to simply enable communication amongst members of a project team, SharePoint is your tool. If you need to comply with stringent regulations or are at serious risk of litigation, you want to consider a more robust ECM tool. For those organizations that already have an ECM tool in place but are starting to think about SharePoint, integration might be your best bet. And that will be the topic of my next post later this week.