C3 Associates Inc.

This is the second of a two-part series that summarizes the main points in the ongoing debate about the impact of Microsoft SharePoint on the ECM community.  Last week I reviewed several reasons why traditional Enterprise Content Management vendors will continue to thrive despite Microsoft's push into the ECM space.  This week, it's Microsoft's turn.  As before, my goal is to summarize the key points in the discussion about the impact of SharePoint and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Please leave your feedback or comments below, drop me a note on Twitter or feel free to contact me directly at greg.clark@c3associates.com.

Here are a few reasons SharePoint may become the dominant force in the Enterprise Content Management space. 

1. SharePoint 2010 is more than just basic ECM.  Where SharePoint 2007 could still be considered "basic content services", SharePoint 2010 has addressed most of the shortcomings that prevented this platform from competing head-to-head with traditional ECM tools.  A couple of months ago I summarized the eight reasons SharePoint 2010 is a true ECM system and based on the feedback I have heard from several of my clients, most feel that SharePoint has reached the tipping point where they will start to seriously consider shifting their ECM platforms over to SharePoint.  For most organizations considering a net-new ECM implementation, SharePoint is often the only candidate, especially where the organization is already committed to the Microsoft stack.  Microsoft has invested heavily in building out key ECM functionality like records management and has significantly improved SharePoint's ability to handle metadata and very large lists, among many other improvements.  The list of functional differences between SharePoint and traditional ECM systems has become so small that traditional ECM vendors will have an increasingly difficult time differentiating their products from SharePoint.  
2. SharePoint is the silver bullet of user adoption.  User adoption is a challenge that has dogged the ECM industry from the very beginning.  Many organizations feel the only thing preventing ECM from becoming truly successful is a poor user interface that limited user uptake (for an excellent summary of this question, read the wisdom shared by experienced ECM practitioner Mike Alsup, who reminds us that user adoption is about far more than a slick user interface), it seems that everyone wants to believe that SharePoint 2010 is the answer to all of their prayers.  Whether it is or not seems almost beside the point; perception is reality and that poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  The fact remains that SharePoint offers an excellent user experience. To Microsoft's credit, SharePoint has been designed with the information worker in mind.  The tool "thinks the way the worker thinks" and user uptake of SharePoint tends to be quick and requires minimal training. This can pose a problem where the implementation is unplanned, leading to a rapid  proliferation of SharePoint sites and some would argue simply replicating the shared drive mess in SharePoint. However, as integrators and Microsoft partners learn how to plan and govern SharePoint deployments, the intuitive user interface will help SharePoint dominate the ECM space in the same way that MS Office has dominated the desktop.  
3. Size matters. The sheer scale of Microsoft poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  They clearly can't outspend Microsoft on marketing and Microsoft's partner ecosystem is unmatched anywhere.  In the first part of this two-part series I said that one key advantage for traditional ECM platforms is their strong vertical story. This could be quickly eroded by many of the partners who have built and continue to build tightly integrated solutions suited to nearly any industry you can think of.  Yes, traditional ECM vendors have a head start in this area but Microsoft and their partner are hot on their heels.  Further, there is a wealth of SharePoint information freely available from MSDN, Codeplex and the many thousands of SharePoint MVP and partner blogs and websites.  It seems that if it can be known about SharePoint, it will be available somewhere for free and this will lead to rapid innovation and an improved product.  
4. SharePoint has a strong social story.  SharePoint started life as a collaboration platform and has evolved from this into a social computing platform. As the demands grow to provide Facebook-like tools in an enterprise context, SharePoint is very well positioned to meet this need. SharePoint may not be best of breed but many enterprises seem comfortable collaborating using a platform from a know n quantity such as Microsoft. To date, the efforts of traditional ECM vendors to "socialize" their platforms have not received widespread adoption and there are questions about their continued desire to play in this space in light of stiff competition from Microsoft.  
5. SharePoint is much more than just ECM.  SharePoint is a portal, a document management system, a business intelligence tool, a records management system, a social networking platform, a web content management system, development platform and an enterprise search tool.  Many established ECM vendors can say many of these same things, but the Microsoft story is especially compelling for organizations already committed to the Microsoft stack.
6. Microsoft will win because they're Microsoft.  The intangible advantage that Microsoft has is based on their history. Whenever Microsoft sets their mind to do something, very little will get in their way.  Remember the early days of the relational database wars?  Ask yourself when the last time was that you came across a Sybase database and you have some idea what that might mean for some traditional ECM vendors.   And if you don't think Microsoft is targeting traditional ECM vendors with SharePoint 2010, think again.  With SharePoint 2007, Microsoft started the process of embedding SharePoint into their core Office suite but was clear that most organizations still needed a traditional ECM system for the higher ECM functions. For more on this, see my blog post outlining some of the functional gaps between SharePoint and traditional ECM. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has changed their focus from partnering with traditional ECM to trying to out-compete them (of course they won't say this officially but their all-out marketing push at the 2010 AIIM show is a clear indicator).

I hope this short series has been useful. I'm sure there are other reasons why SharePoint may or may not dominate the ECM space and I am keen to hear your perspective. 

Please leave your comments below and I will reply as best I can.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.