Month: August 2009

What Users Need from ECM Vendors

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A few weeks ago, I talked about the Future of Content Management and then a week ago I talked about What ECM Needs to be Today.  I wanted to continue the thought process and talk about what clients need from their ECM vendors today.  It isn’t just new features or learning how awesome they are compared to other vendors.  What most clients need is help getting the most from their system, today.  The twist is, the systems out there are almost never the latest version.

I’m going to use EMC and their Documentum suite as an example.  The needs of the users are the same across all products, so don’t assume that these needs are specific to EMC.

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EMC and Web Content Management

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I made a few observations the other week about the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management that came out recently.  I, and others, criticized what it was measuring (though one blogger defended the MQ). I made the following comment in my dissection:

Personally, I think EMC (Documentum) and IBM (FileNet) are Niche Players in the WCM world at best.  Why?  Their WCM products sell into a very specific niche, those companies that already have, or are making, investments in their EMC or IBM platforms. If you know of either product winning a pure WCM bid, let me know.

Well, no comments on them winning a bid.  Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just means that people that know of such wins didn’t read the post or care to comment. My point still is that EMC’s, and IBM’s, WCM offering is not the “Challenger” as the MQ seems to suggest.

Let’s dig in a little.

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Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases

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I’ve been meaning to get this done for a while.  Over the last year, I’ve run into people that saw a need for CMIS as a whole, but didn’t think that it mattered for them.  Usually, the reason was that they only saw one use case for CMIS.  Well, there are three fundamental use cases for CMIS, with multiple examples for each.

To facilitate understanding of the use cases, I have created a presentation which I have placed up on SlideShare.  You can go directly to The Point Of The Content Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard, or view the embedded version here and read the elaboration of the use cases below.

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What ECM Needs to be Today

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A couple of weeks ago, I threw my vision of where I described the future of Content Management.  I took it beyond ECM to Omnipresent Content Management (OCM for now).  Lee Dallas then build upon that future by changing the very content that we generate and manage.  The question still remaining is, what is ECM going to be today and over the next couple of years?

Last year, I threw out a new definition for ECM.  I still think it applies, but the story around it has evolved.  Here is that working definition of ECM.

Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

Let’s look at this definition in today’s light.

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Am I Buying a WCM Solution or Stock?

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The Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management came out for the first time this month.  I say the first time because it was always a Market Scope before the 2009 report.  If you look at it, you can learn many things.  The one thing you won’t learn is if any of the products are right for you, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Jon Marks did a good job of comparing Gartner’s and Forrester’s latest rankings and highlights how a “Niche Player” may be worth considering. CMS Watch has stronger words on the topic, talking about some of the differences between their methodology and Gartner’s.

I have a few of my own thoughts to add into the fray…

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