C3 Associates Inc.

As I get ready to head off to Seattle for next week’s SharePoint conference I’m struck by how different my mindset will be from the recent Livelink work I’ve been doing. In Livelink, organizations are able to create highly controlled document management scenarios for things like engineering drawing management and records management. This is supported by rich and relatively mature vertical applications that can be tuned to a specific organization’s requirements (although they work pretty well out of the box).

Looking at the sessions I’ll be attending next week the focus is decidedly more on collaboration and ease of use. And even where sessions address issues like RM or high-volume document management, the tone seems to suggest that they’re just getting started in these areas, which, in fact, they are. This isn’t a negative thing; I’m personally very excited by Microsoft’s interest and commitment to the ECM space.

As I’ve said before, Microsoft takes a very different approach to ECM than traditional vendors like Open Text. The focus of SharePoint is on enabling Information Workers to work collaboratively and, by extension, expose more of an organization’s information to formal management practices like records management. Traditional vendors take largely the opposite approach, focusing primarily on controlling information with collaboration an outcome of good information management. This may seem like a subtle difference but it’s an important one. I hasten to add that it doesn’t mean you can manage records in SharePoint or that Livelink has no collaborative capabilities. Far from it; each has an offering in both areas and can meet certain business scenarios that include both formal document management and ad hoc collaboration. If your organization is considering which ECM tool (or tools) are right for you, my recommendation is to identify what problem you’re setting out to solve today and in the future. If compliance and control are your focus, consider Livelink or another traditional ECM application; if you’re looking to enable collaboration across your organization and / or you do a lot of project work, take a close look at SharePoint.

All of this said I look forward to learning more about real-world SharePoint implementations and also about Microsoft’s future direction for the product and will happily share what I learn with all of you. I’m also curious about your perspective on this question so please feel free to leave a comment.

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.

One of the mandates of this blog is to talk about ECM in a Calgary context, so it was gratifying to read about a local company in one of our industry’s leading publications. The most recent edition of KM World magazine has a feature article about Suncor Energy‘s efforts to manage CAD drawings. You can read the entire piece here.

Suncor uses a combination of Open Text‘s Livelink and Cimmetry Systems AutoVue to manage and access drawing files. The article is an interesting read and provides a good illustration of the excellent work that’s going on in the Calgary ECM community.

Open Text Corp. released the traditional raft of announcements at their annual LiveLinkUp conference in Orlando, Florida today. Here are the highlights from the Open Text website:

Open Text Content Services enable information workers to manage and exploit all content types in a unified way at three critical levels and are comprised of the following core elements:

Open Text Enterprise Library Services – providing a trusted repository to consistently enforce and manage retention schedules, corporate governance, and regulatory compliance policies for all content types enterprise-wide.

What strikes me about these announcements (which you can find here) is that they all seem to be a response to the emergence of Microsoft as a force in the ECM market. Some may say that this is a sign of weakness on the part of Open Text (i.e. that they’ve completely given up on the UI) but I see it as a bridge to a future where best-of-breed ECM applications are tied together.

First off, they haven’t given up on the UI; the Enterprise Connect tool improves access to the Livelink repository from desktop applications and browser interfaces alike and provides a drag-and-drop capabilities between platforms and repositories. Even if organizations find that SharePoint or another application offers a more user-friendly front end, Open Text is positioning themselves as an interface-agnostic repository of record. I think it’s a smart move and, frankly, one in which Open Text had little choice.

As everyone in the ECM industry knows, Microsoft is making a big push into the ECM space with MOSS and have done an excellent job of selling the collaborative capabilities of the tool. Where SharePoint currently falls down is in its ability to meet hard-core compliance and records management requirements. Tools like the ones on offer by Open Text help bridge that gap and should keep the company relevant for some time to come.

Does this mean that Microsoft will never have an enterprise-class RM tool? Or that MOSS won’t start to displace some pure-play SOX compliance tools? Definitely not, because they will at some point. However, I see this as a long and winding road and that organizations are better off to pursue a coexistence strategy until such time as best practice about the deployment of SharePoint as a tool that can help organizations meet stringent regulatory requirements is more widely known.

At the end of the day, I see this as an opportunity. The Open Text Content Services toolset allows organizations to take a best-of-both-worlds approach to ECM. Companies get to take advantage of the slick user experience of SharePoint (slickest when Office 2007 is in use) but can still rely on the tried and true records management, audit and regulatory compliance features of Livelink.

I’ll be talking more about this topic at the Calgary AIIM Conference which is coming next week on November 1st and 2nd. You can find out more about the event and sign up here. Hope to see you there.

Open Text, the makers of Livelink and the new owners of the ECM application formerly known as Hummingbird (now Livelink ECM – eDOCS) released their fiscal 2007 results today. To the surprise of many, profit was up, license revenue was up and debt was down. The result of all of this is an uptick of 10%+ on their share price in after hours trading.

I say ‘to the surprise of many’ because there has been a lot of speculation about the impact that SharePoint would have on incumbent ECM vendors. This very blog predicted a couple of challenging quarters for incumbent ECM vendors through the middle part of 2007 as organizations considering ECM figured out whether SharePoint was up to the task. Based on my observations here in Calgary I stand by my earlier comments about organizations delaying their purchasing decisions about ECM tools. If this is true elsewhere, as I suspect it is, how is it that Open Text has managed to post such impressive results?

My take on this is that Gartner’s predictions about the growth in the ECM market are accurate and that there is enough to go around for everyone. Microsoft reports that SharePoint revenues topped $800 million in 2007 which exceeds Open Text’s revenues by more than $200 million. My math tells me that this gives Microsoft about 28% market share in the ECM space and Open Text 20% (that’s $800 million and $595 million of the $2.9 billion that Gartner predicted). I may be wrong about how long organizations are delaying their purchasing decisions or it may be that they’re approaching their ECM solution as an “and” when it comes to SharePoint instead of an “or”. I’d appreciate any comments you, my loyal readers (both of you), might have about this one.

In terms of the overall ECM market, for companies that have already deployed a non-SharePoint ECM solution the question is how and where does SharePoint fit in (if at all in some cases). For those that have not yet deployed an ECM tool, the question is, firstly, why the heck not and second, does SharePoint give me everything I need? To me, the more important issue is to identify what problems your organization is trying to solve. It is very easy (and very common) to start talking technology before figuring out the business problem you are expecting an ECM tool to help address.

While it is difficult to distil a complex discussion about the ECM market into a single blog post, my view on this hasn’t changed. Incumbent ECM vendors will very likely continue to have success meeting the needs of organizations with a heavy regulatory requirement to manage their content and also in areas where they own mature vertical markets. SharePoint will gain ground in these areas over time as third party applications providing strong compliance management, engineering drawing management, legal matter management etc. are developed and bolted on to SharePoint. Maturing integrations between traditional ECM apps and SharePoint will also help. SharePoint clearly owns the collaborative space and will continue to dominate the desktop. It’s easy to use and viral in nature and is hard to stop once it gets a toehold in an organization. Whether this is a good thing or not is a topic for another day, but again the bottom line is to identify your business need and find the tool (or tools) that fit the bill.

I’ll give another plug to my friends at AIIM who have recognized that many organizations both inside and outside the world of ECM are asking these very questions. Their SharePoint Meets ECM sessions are scheduled for this fall and I suggest you attend if you can. For those of you in and around Calgary, I’ll be speaking more on this topic this fall as well.