C3 Associates

And if you get that obscure reference, you’ve clearly got a four year old at home. Find out more about Harry and his crazy adventures with a bucket full of dinosaurs here.

My colleague John Meilleur and I are looking forward to our own crazy adventures this week down in Orlando at the Open Text Content World conference. We’ll be posting daily summaries of what we learn so check back for updates. John will focus on the ECM for Microsoft track, I’ll be attending the Content Lifecycle Management track and we may even sneak into some sessions from other tracks. We might even find time for a nap. Can’t wait.

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.

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.