Intelligent Enterprise | Alan Pelz-Sharpe on Content Management

Forget ECM: It's Document Management From Here On In

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:46:13 -0500

At CMS Watch we frequently have to explain to people why we have separate research streams for WCM (Web Content Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management). The explanation is frequently a response to the question, "aren't they just the same thing?" The simple answer is no, they are not.

Three Reasons to List CMIS in Your Document Management RFP

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:41:48 -0500

First off let me state boldly and clearly CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard) is an important document management (a.k.a., ECM) standard -- the most important standard. But if your world is solely one of HTML and CSS then you can stop reading right here...

CMIS was recently ratified by OASIS and is already appearing in many RFPs. Nevertheless, it is a little misunderstood by some, and at times gets overlooked or misplaced. So here are three concise and valid reasons for putting CMIS on your list of RFP requirements.

Is the SharePoint Bubble Going to Burst?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:51:24 -0500

My colleagues Tony Byrne and Shawn Shell (the lead analysts for CMS Watch SharePoint Research) recently reported on the hysteria generated around product announcements for SharePoint 2010 earlier this month in Las Vegas. There is plenty to be excited about in SP2010, especially if you belong to the SharePoint channel of resellers, consultants, developers, and system integrators. But over the past few weeks I have been noticing something of a shadow side to this excitement.

I may well be wrong, but I am starting to get the distinct impression that the SharePoint bubble is about to burst. Or at the very least, that enthusiasm for SharePoint is waning and demand for the platform set will begin to plateau.

Dealing With the ECM Skills Shortage

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:39:11 -0500

Enterprises are facing something of a recruitment dilemma at the moment; one HR professional at a major healthcare firm told me this week that enterprise content management (ECM)-skilled applicants are looking for approximately 40% more in base pay than their peers with a background in CRM or ERP. This healthcare firm simply doesn't have budget to make the required hires, and that is not an uncommon situation.

Truth is, ECM professionals have been in short supply for a long time -- and even mediocre people can demand and receive decent money in this sector. This of course is a real challenge for employers.

Records and the Threat of Cloud Computing

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:27:18 -0500

I recently hosted a panel for ARMA that discussed compliance and records management issues related to Cloud Computing. It proved to be one of the most thought-provoking sessions I have been involved in for a long time. What became abundantly clear very early on was that records managers and compliance officers really need to get their head around cloud computing, and fast.

In the session we spent some time explaining that for every vendor out there that claims to have a cloud solution, only one in ten really has. That "cloud" relates to a virtualized world utilizing the Internet as a network -- whereas hosted and SaaS options (the nine out of ten) almost always have a specific data center location that they operate from.

2009 ECM Market Overview

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:41:51 -0500

As I have said before, at CMS Watch we focus on evaluating individual vendors. Nevertheless, we do think it is important for every buyer to grasp a basic understanding of underlying market dynamics.

For those of you interested at what is happening in the world of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), here is a SlideShare recording that looks at our updated Cross-Check analysis of the vendors as of September, 2009.

Shadow IT: A Plague on Good Governance

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:10:44 -0500

One of my favorite technology terms is "Shadow IT." The term is not employed often enough, and its role in undermining good information management should be more widely broadcast, because Shadow IT represents a plague on content management.

For those of you that don't know, Shadow IT refers to the technology that has been deployed (and once in a while maintained) outside of the formal IT organization. Commonly it refers to teams or groups who figure they can do things better and cheaper than by going through the normal IT channels.

iManage & iPhone: Something New, Something Old

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:57:12 -0500

Search-cum-enteprise content management (ECM) vendor Autonomy has announced an integration for its recently acquired WorkSite product with the iPhone. The WorkSite product is particularly well known and widely used within the Legal community. Smart mobile devices are increasingly usurping the role of laptops as the mobile computing device of choice, so secure access to documents in your ECM system via the iPhone makes a great deal of sense, particularly if you are an on-the-move attorney.

One small point of annoyance with this particular announcement is that it claims the iPhone integration to be the first of its kind. It's not, and in the spirit of debunking myths let me just remind the PR folk at Autonomy of the following:

Electronic Medical Records: No Slam Dunk

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:53:51 -0500

Here in the US, the topic of electronic medical records has popped back to the top of the agenda, due to an impending mass injection of government money. Long talked about, long promised and long mandated (remember HIPAA?) -- electronic medical records in the US are for all intents and purposes still a pipedream. Yet as a late adopter (to put it politely) the US can potentially benefit in part from experiences in UK and Europe in general.

The UK has long been pushing the benefits of and investing heavily in electronic medical records -- yet the slam dunk that the new administration seems to expect in terms of benefits has yet to be realized elsewhere. To explore why takes us into a range of big and complex enterprise content management (ECM) topics, but we can focus in on two key areas that will, without doubt, tax the new administration it moves forward with this initiative:

Ingres and Alfresco Offer an ECM 'Appliance'

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:22:34 -0500

This week Alfresco, together with Ingres, announced the release of an ECM "appliance."

Well, one thing we can say for sure is that Alfresco is never out of the trade press, and always seem to have something interesting to announce to the world. Overall that's a good thing as innovation can sometimes be in short supply. It's nice to see somebody bucking the trend. However, this particular announcement left me a bit befuddled. Mainly because it is not really an appliance as such, rather it's a software bundling of sorts.

Picking the Right Supplier in a Recession

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:19:11 -0500

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" -- so the saying goes. And in tough times there is, without a shadow of a doubt, a tendency for procurement and IT buyers in general to lean heavily toward very large (or incumbent) vendors, on the assumption that they represent a lower risk. But consider the following examples based on real vendors CMS Watch covers in its evaluation services:

Autonomy Acquires Interwoven: A First Take

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:06:15 -0500

Today Autonomy announced it intends to buy Interwoven.

It was a surprise move for sure. Not that I was surprised that Interwoven was acquired, far from it; I expected that. But I did not expect them to be acquired by Autonomy. Autonomy has grown by acquisition and is one of the few firms that recently announced good revenues and a bullish outlook for 2009.

Pollyanna and the Technology Market

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:06:37 -0500

The technology sector has been nothing but doom and gloom recently, but a recent report by the Aite Group shines a bit more light on to what is a fairly complex market situation. The report focuses on spending in the capital markets, and considering the spectacular turmoil in that sector over the past year, its a particularly interesting one to read. The skinny on the report is that IT spending will fall by on average 5 percent in 2009. A figure that is fall less severe than one might have expected, yet the logic behind the modesty of this prediction is pretty sound.

Firstly, just because legendary firms disappear and people are laid off, does not mean that information stops being processed. In fact in many cases, mergers and corporate downsizing create more information and more processing, though this is, of course, counterbalanced to some degree by a tail off in new applications and activity. But the initial information volumes remain fairly constant � and by their nature grow incrementally regardless.

Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:00:37 -0500

One of my favorite little phrases is "double edged sword," and I found a perfect application for it recently: the discussion of "incumbent vendors" � those whose product(s) you're already using.

Imagine you have been using a particular vendor's technology for the past five or ten years. It could be EMC|Documentum or Open Text or any one of the 197 other products CMS Watch evaluates. I'll just call them Vendor X. But now it's time for an upgrade, or even a replacement of that technology. It did what it was supposed to do at the time, but now technology has moved on and it's time for a refresh. So you're kicking off a major project and starting up the RFP and shortlisting process.

Content Integration: Early Thoughts on CMIS

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:52:07 -0500

Since the announcement of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) I have been inundated with requests to speak and write on the topic. There's no two ways about it; CMIS has caught the imagination of buyers and the industry at large. Yet CMIS (pronounced See-Miss) is still only a specification, not a standard, and � as I talk to buyers, integrators and vendors � I'm aware that it is also a poorly understood specification. Of course this will be an ongoing story that will evolve over time, and it is one CMS Watch will monitor closely as it's one our subscribers are very interested in. But here are a couple of early observations from the field...

SAP Operates in the ECM Shadows

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:12:39 -0500

To know what's really going on within a firm or the industry in which it operates you need to watch where the money is flowing.

In September money flowed in some interesting directions within the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. At Open Text it flowed out, as Chairman and CEO John Shakelton dumped almost all of his shareholdings. In contrast at NewGen in India it flowed in through a confirmed investment from SAP's venture arm (which has already invested in open source ECM player Alfresco, among others).

Three Continents, One SharePoint Story

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:50:38 -0500

SharePoint has been on my mind a lot recently, not least because we have been undertaking more research on the product and its usage in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) context. I've also had the unusual opportunity to speak to integrators, resellers and buyers on three continents over the past couple of weeks. The questions I asked may not have been scientific, or statistically meaningful, but they have at least been consistent. For example when I talked to buyers I asked:

� Does your organization currently use SharePoint?
� Does your organization currently use any other ECM systems?
� Are you planning to replace any existing ECM systems with SharePoint?

Will Open Text Suffer Acquisition Indigestion?

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:43:28 -0500

Yesterday I got a call from my friend Paul Steep at Scotia Capital regarding this announcement from ECM vendor Open Text. Yes, you guessed it, Open Text is acquring again. Just as I predicted in July the firm has announced its intentions to buy Captaris.

At first glance it appears to be a good deal for Open Text, as it provides them with capture technology (image and text recognition, a' la Kofax) that they previously lacked. Captaris themselves acquired Oce Document Technology (ODT) a German-based forms recognition firm in January 2008 and absorbed its DOKuStar product range.

Alfresco Offers SharePoint Alternative

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:46:55 -0500

Microsoft SharePoint goes open source? Shock, horror! Ok, well not quite, but an open source alternative to SharePoint is now an option with the release of Alfresco's Lab 3 Beta product. The new module allows you to hook Office into Alfresco, giving you the option to use Alfresco as opposed to SharePoint as your collaboration platform.

It's an interesting option. As readers of the CMS Watch ECM Suites Report 2008 know, Alfresco is one of the more interesting ECM vendors around. The question you might ask yourself however is, why would anyone want to do use Alfresco instead of SharePoint? Clearly open source enthusiasts will herald this as a major breakthrough � and those enterprises that espouse open source may well become customers. But then again, if you are going to dump Microsoft for the back end, why use Office at all, given there are open source alternatives?

Legal Ruling Shakes Up E-mail Archiving

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:53:43 -0500

The whole issue of E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) has come under the spotlight recently, triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco � a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." Plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees � text messages that were held by a hosted vendor, Arch Wireless � that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words, even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

Avoid End-of-Quarter Buying and ELAs

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:32:12 -0500

Last week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to Procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular. Though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US-based Enterprise Content Management systems integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points:

� Never buy at the end of a quarter
� Avoid Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs)

Archiving and the Limitations of E-Discovery

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:23:32 -0500

Last week we read about yet another major financial scandal allegedly exposed through the discovery of an e-mail message from a fund principal that apparently stated that their fund was going to be "toast."

The first thing I thought about this was that (if true) it was a fantastically stupid communication to put in an e-mail exchange. Secondly, I wondered why it took so long to find this e-mail � surely such high-profile financial managers would have their e-mail exchanges monitored automatically and an exchange like this should have rung every major alarm bell in the firm within seconds. Of course they could have been using an external system to get around that; we don't know at present. But this case once more highlights the limitations of e-mail monitoring (recently discussed here) and e-discovery, and conversely the value of content archiving.

Cloud Computing vs. Green ECM

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:17:50 -0500

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing. It's a great term, "Cloud Computing," as it conjures up visions of an invisible Internet � an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future.

Imaging: The Most Important Element of ECM?

Thu, 15 May 2008 08:43:59 -0500

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. During the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital, even though paper is clearly here to stay.

'Compliance' Is a Dirty Word

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:37:52 -0500

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's "compliance."

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out that the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.