Compliance - Never Talk When You Can Nod: Recent Comments

Comment on ECM delivered using SaaS

Andrew Chapman — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:47:20 GMT

I agree totally and was thinking about how to improve the simile; perhaps delivering ECM is synonymous with having to get a 3-phase supply to a device in the house. The general premise is the same – I need to get electricity to a device, the electricity supply I need uses the same basic infrastructure but in order for the 3-phase device to function I am going to have to make sure that my wires can cope with the extra load.

On a more serious note, you are completely correct in pointing out that ECM on SaaS raises some ‘special’ requirements around bandwidth, storage, provisioning and security…if you consider that EMC makes hardware, owns Documentum, VMWare and RSA it is easy to see why this is a very compelling play for us.

Comment on ECM delivered using SaaS

Robin East — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:52:57 GMT

I think the comparison with delivering electricity really does show the huge problem with SaaS for ECM (the emphasis on enterprise). All the issues that you raise with trying to deliver ECM in this manner suggest that ECM really is nothing like electricity. Electricity to a large extent is a homogenous undifferentiated commodity that is largely measurable as a single quantity perhaps with a minimum measure of quality thrown in. You really can't sensibly characterise ECM like this and get value out of it.

Yes SaaS for ECM is probably inevitable but in the same way that outsourcing to India/China/ Eastern Europe was inevitable. For a while everyone (clients, suppliers and media) will be jumping on the bandwagon expecting a hugely valuable paradigm shift. Most will be disappointed. I can understand why EMC feel that they can't miss out on this but it doesn't make the value proposition any better.

Comment on Reference Architecture 7: Active Back-end Aggregation

Andrew Chapman — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:14:31 GMT

Lori,

If you ask your Documentum account manager to contact me I will discuss the details with them and they can get back to you. Just to warn you though, the first step will be for us to ask you for a detailed set of use cases so we can understand which of the aggregation options will suit you best.

Regards

Andrew

Comment on EMC's Real Acquisition Strategy...

Vince Golubic — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:11:10 GMT

Good one. I think Einstein would appreciate what you're doing to keep him front and center and musically inclined.

Comment on Reference Architecture 7: Active Back-end Aggregation

Lori — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:11:59 GMT

This is the solution that we need. We have a few Documentum applications in house. The company that acquired us has a lot of SP sites (1,200) - they have MOSS 2007 but haven't implemented it yet. We are migrating our current portal to MOSS. We are just starting the project - when will the details of this solutions be available?

Comment on SharePoint vs. ECM; Same Battle as SQL Server vs Oracle?

Andrew Chapman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:37:45 GMT

Mark,

I could not agree more. I see this Blog as my best way of giving everyone full disclosure! Thanks for the feedback from the trenches.

Andrew

Comment on SharePoint vs. ECM; Same Battle as SQL Server vs Oracle?

Mark Kaye — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:31:24 GMT

There are some very good points raised here. Looking at this from a strategy point of view, the marriage of MOSS and ECM seems like one that could have been made in heaven. This is certainly the case for organisations that need a collaborative working solution that integrates well with the desktop and that can also provide basic document management functionality while at the same time needing to keep at least a subset of this information longer term as company records.

In the real world, I suspect this nirvana lasts approximately as long as it takes the license revenue cheque to clear in Microsoft's and the ECM vendor's bank account. In my experience that is when the real work has to begin and no organisation is going to make the marriage a success without investing a lot of time, effort and ultimately money. Hey, this sounds like a real marriage doesn't it?

The fact is that the data models in MOSS and the ECM solutions are not a close fit, and integration is not a straighforward task. Such a solution does not fit the typical COTS approach that many organisations are now trying to follow. i.e. We want to configure these two things to work together, we don't want to develop the integration ourselves.

It seems that quite a few organisations are at that point right now. They are facing (often very reluctantly) the reality of what integration between MOSS and ECM means to them and how this can be achieved with as little compromise as possible. Just the operational implications alone of a complex, custom developed integration are enough to make most service folk wince.

Until the market for such integrations matures my advice would be to enter into the task with your eyes wide open and to fully understand the implications of what you are doing.

Comment on SharePoint vs. ECM; Same Battle as SQL Server vs Oracle?

Ian Turner — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 08:29:46 GMT

Regarding MOSS competitiveness against ECM systems and functionality we have to remember that alot of organizations out there when evaluating the ECM solutions are bombarded with MOSS propaganda (okay this is quite a harsh word!) about "it can do this", "it can do that" (looking at entire scope of functionality), without highlighting longer term and integration issues.

I have seen situations where IT decision makers see this attractiveness of other non-content management centric functionalities and maybe decide, in conjunction with not reading about limitations and scalability in content management space that MOSS is the corporate wide ECM solution for them.

As an indicator for this I have recently been involved in a client with a long history of an ECM installation. They wanted a MOSS Extranet environment for document creation, editing and viewing and decided NOT to expose their ECM solution. They decided to use MOSS Document Libraries as their new content repository. Within just one week of running with MOSS have come up with 120 man day's worth of effort of "Must Have" functionality. You can see why it is such an attractive proposition as a solution - they went straight in to Production Pilot without evaluating functionality with the end-users first.

Comment on SharePoint vs. ECM; Same Battle as SQL Server vs Oracle?

Laurence Hart — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:39:51 GMT

Andrew, I think you were right the first time. Access has a lot of features outside of databases. It has built-in forms, reports, and the ability to build a complete application without any other components. You can even add ActiveX controls from third parties to speed your development.

That is a lot like SharePoint, only with content.

Comment on SharePoint vs. ECM; Same Battle as SQL Server vs Oracle?

Andrew Chapman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:26:21 GMT

Marko,

Giving this some thought overnight, maybe a better analogy would be comparing "SharePoint vs. traditional ECM" to the "Office Desktop Tools vs. SQL Server" rather than just "Access vs. SQL Server".

The Office Desktop Tools include Word, PowerPoint, Access, etc. - the Office desktop tool set includes a database as well as a set of related productivity tools. Just like SharePoint contains ECM capabilities as well as a set of related productivity tools.

Using this analogy you see that the Office suite contains a database that supports many requirements within the scope of the other Office tools but would you deploy that database (Access) for something larger – probably not.

My prior analogy didn’t take in to consideration the fact that SharePoint contains many features outside of its ECM support; it made SharePoint sound like it was just an ECM system. SharePoint functionality is certainly not a subset of the functionality of a traditional ECM system just as the traditional ECM systems do not implement a subset of SharePoint’s functionality. I’m sure you can envision the Venn diagram.

Does that make sense? In fact, do you agree?