Long time since an update at the ECMSignals. I have been attending a week of accelerated learning at Capgeminis University at Les Fountaines. A trilling experience, but I’m now back to the reality of using the learning experiences in a real environment.
In this blogspot I would like to share some reflections regarding document management and document collaboration. This is a field where organisations can gain huge improvements and strong return on investments. Implementing solutions in this is segment organisations will discover a magnitude of quick wins.
The As-Is situation in document collaboration
In 90% of organisations the employees uses Microsoft Word to collaborate on documents. They use Words “powerful” :-) built-in collaboration features, and after a few edit rounds the documents become unwieldy to read. Reviewers then have to send an email explaining why they made a certain change, along with comments made inline in the document. By the end of the process you have 19 versions of the same file from 6 different people and 90 emails discussing the content. The document is then stored on a file server (the L: drive) with the file name as the only identifier. Example of such a collaborative filename is: “custproject_final_19_PCD.doc”. This is madness and the organisations need to take actions to control and improve the situation.
Together with my status description (As-Is) on document collaboration I also read a report published by the Butler Group that states that employees spend up to 25% of their working day on non-productive, document collaboration related tasks. The report goes on to say that organisations risk a great deal more that poor business performance by not managing the collaboration, production and lifecycle of documents, and time has come to move from intra-company collaboration to more sophisticated inter-company collaboration.
Business managers need to seek out new means how the most expensive of all corporate assets – the information worker - can be more efficient, effective and productive. The key enabler in this quest is the interaction between information and people, so by relating to Butler Group that knowledge workers (the most expensive one) uses up to 25% of the time at non productive activities a quick win should be to implement a document and collaboration system.
Is Document Management on the agenda?
To illustrate this I refer to a recent Forrester report that asked 1,017 software decision-makers from North American and European enterprise companies about their ECM plans, and the results are overwhelming:
• Nearly 75% of organisations will invest in document management in 2008
• Nearly 65% of organisations will invest in team collaboration software in 2008
• Microsoft leads all vendors by a large margin with nearly 25% of organizations planning to invest in Microsoft’s technology for ECM
The future
Microsoft looks set to dominate this battle with the ECM vendors in order to become the leading Document Collaboration platform provider of choice, and Microsoft will integrate all office applications into one platform - MOSS. But there are new Web-based technologies and companies (google.com and zoho.com) that will force Microsoft and other ECM vendors to re-think their strategies over the coming year. For more indepth information please read my blog post regarding My personal view on the Microsoft Yahoo acquisition
In my work SharePoint 2007 is a hot topic these days. With the release of SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), I’m trying to get a grasp on this platforms reach into the enterprise, and the issues surrounding SharePoint implementations. According to the latest from Osterman Research, SharePoint is becoming the de facto collaboration platform for many organizations today and study results for SharePoint are positive The Osterman study tried to determine trends in the future use of SharePoint. Results of the study indicate that in organizations that deployed Microsoft Exchange, more than half are currently using SharePoint and 12 percent plan to deploy SharePoint within the next 12 months.”Survey points to Microsoft SharePoint becoming a de-facto collaboration platform” Michael Osterman This is a result based on that the platform is easy to use (and parts of) the platform becoming more widely deployed and ingrained in the work habits of end-users. And if there’s anything Microsoft knows well, it’s how to ingratiate itself with the enterprise. On the other side the recent CMSWatch "ECM Suites Report" says that SharePoint is an ECM virus with “IT departments enthusiastically promoting the platform because the end-users and departments can install and run these small repositories themselves”. – Are the IT department scared of work and responsibility? In their research, CMSWatch found that SharePoint is often is implemented in a ad-hoc fashion with little compliance and controls on it’s use – that’s why CMSWatc uses the term “virus”. The difference between these two opinions comes primarily in how SharePoint is used. Fully or partly used as a collaboration tool, it’s widely accepted. As an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tool, there tends to be a long way to go. But to help there are several third-party vendors that try to bridge Microsoft ECM gap – an example is eDRM-vendor Merido and CMS-vendor EPIServer (ElectroPost) In use-cases content is stored and managed in the same system (DB), but the designs, implementation process and governance is different. And there are also wide spread SharePoint implementation on ad-hoc basis with no root in the organisation strategy, business plan and goals - this is dangerous. In the CMSWatch survey they report an example of a North American bank that reported more than 5,000 uncontrolled and unaudited instances of SharePoint. SCARY! My opinion is that share Point as a technology is supposed to support an enterprise, not drive it. Technology is an enabler. That means an organization should be carefully thinking about its business strategy and how its available resources assist that strategy. With this in mind, governance becomes the critical success factor in a SharePoint implementation plan. Whether it’s implemented at department or enterprise level, as collaboration or a content management platform implementation strategies and a governance plan must be in place to support the content stored in SharePoint. Any opinions on this?
Sometimes I’m struggling to se the difference between content tools, and the lines between the families are notoriously blurry.
This seems especially case among Enterprise Information Portals (EIP), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Web Content Management (WCM), where I see a lot of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. Also to add to the confusion several vendors, due to accusations, have several overlapping product lines in the market.
An example is that if you're looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of those three types of products. Some consultancies will also try to sell you all three types of solutions, with the obligatory integration project.
My recommendation is to take a business approach to the project, and describe what solves your most pressing needs before selecting content technology, tools or platform. Describe the core of your business problem or opportunity, and then build the selection process from there. The reality is that these three different types of products have their defined strengths and weaknesses, and they tend to address different problems. By understanding what you're trying to accomplish, you can better identify the types of content technology you need.
My opinion is that the WCM products support fundamentally publishing scenarios and has the focus on semi-structured content and content delivery with employee-friendly editorial interfaces. There are also ECM vendors that claim that they have publishing capabilities, but in my opinion ECM delivery become more process oriented, and vendors often focus their solution into industry verticals such as e.g. finance, public.
Vendors also add to the confusion, and to be sure they have the best fit for the market they often market the same product for different categories of problems, and sometimes that actually makes sense. The promise of e.g. MOSS 2007 is that this toolset can conceivably play in all of these three (WCM, ECM and EIP) spaces to varying degrees, but Microsoft has different ways of getting there, and one SharePoint installation still will be implemented and used in several different ways.
Of course the solutions also overlap. For example WCM sites implemented as a ”Community-oriented” site may well look quite a bit like a "Collaboration Portal," which in turn might look like a "ECM Workgroup Collaboration" site. All in all this come down to the implementation, amount of tailoring and presentation layer of each delivery. So there is possible very little difference between the products, but on the other hand you should be aware that the tools approach your problems in different ways.
So my recommendation is that you should build a good specification and business case that has a good fit with your overall business objectives, and then figure out which type of tools that provide the biggest near-term value. This mean that you should specify and describe what type of need(s) and scenario(s) you're addressing, and the key objective in the specification is that you carefully outline what you're trying to achieve with which types of content. A little analysis here can save you a lot of time and money at later stage.
After several attempts by Oracle to acquire BEA, the two companies entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire BEA. By acquiring BEA oracle will now have four portal products and I guess that the Oracle management need to make some tough decisions – they can’t bring all products to the marked. I also question the overlapping developement and engineering efforts.
Oracle has already announced that they would continue supporting BEA products after the acquisition. The situation could become quite interesting for portal customers though, as Oracle would find itself in possession of four different portal products:
- Oracle Portal
- Oracle WebCenter
- BEA WebLogic Portal
- BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (formerly Plumtree)
The product lines significantly overlap and I will try to give a quick description regarding overlaps:
- BEA AquaLogic and Oracle WebCenter both focus on integration and SOA, and can offer good web application development toolkits.
- BEA WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal bring to marked strengths in role and object based portals with focus on personalization and segmentation, and can offer a platform for self-service applications
- All four portals offer only average CMS and DMS functions in comparison to other special ECM and portal vendors
Oracle aquired BEA with overlapping products, this bring Oracle into a position where they have to support 4 product lines with a oversized engineering and support team. In my oppinion Oracle should merge with a company with complementary products (WCM or ECM), this would make sense and would bring synergies.
Therefore I struggle understand Oracles acquisition strategy, and I miss to se the synergy, and as I see it – ”two plus two is still equalling...just two”.
If any se this different please bring me wisdom ☺
Long time since an update at the ECMSignals. I have been attending a week of accelerated learning at Capgeminis University at Les Fountaines. A trilling experience, but I’m now back to the reality of using the learning experiences in a real environment. 
