I spent a good part of my day today attending the SharePoint meets ECM seminar in Washington, DC. Organized by AIIM, this seminar was marketed as an introduction of MOSS into the world of ECM. So I went to see and hear stories of SharePoint either as a front-end to an ECM platform, or as a platform unto itself. The day didn’t start well.
Information
Why ECM Really Matters
There has been one force driving ECM projects since before the entire space evolved out of Imaging. Storage. We are talking two types of storage here. There is the type sold by the folks over at EMC, and the type that costs even more. The first is easy. If we only store one copy of an electronic image, that is less storage and less for applications to manage. Reducing the second can help save the world.
A New ECM Standard for Spinning Wheels
Lee Smith found an interesting event taking place in the UK. While his post doesn’t make 100% clear what he thinks of this effort (I think he is in favor), I think that it needs some commenting upon.
Essentially, an integrator in the UK, The Content Group, is teaming up with BSI Group, an engineering standards company out of the UK, to create a group of ECM Standards. The Standards that they plan on creating are a collection of definitions and best practices. This seems like a marketing ploy to me.
Control Those Search Results
The ECM Magic Quadrant
[Updated 11/10/2008 in order to make Gartner, Inc. happier, or at least less angry.]
[Edit: See the newer The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2008 write-up.]
The latest version [This is the now old 2007 version] came out a couple weeks ago. There has been, and will continue to be, some criticism of the Gartner, Inc. methodology. For now, let’s set it aside and look focus on what the report says. While it may not cover all the vendors, and may not define “leader” in the same manner as others, the information inside can still prove useful.
Retention Across the Enterprise
James McGovern, in responding to my previous post, brought up an interesting problem that I’d run across before, but hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Not because we didn’t see the importance of the problem, but because we were several stages away from being able to even worry about it. When you don’t even have policies, getting into the nitty-gritty about implementing them across multiple systems from one control is not first on your list of concerns.
Records Management and ECM
James McGovern and Jesse Wilkins have recently been exchanging a few thoughts regarding Records Management. It has been an interesting discussion and it can be an educational read for those that are trying to learn more about Records Management. I thought I would look at what they had written and add my two cents.
Transparent ECM and SOA
Something happened recently that doesn’t happen too often. Two ECM vendors posted blog posts on similar topics. It definitely wasn’t intentional and they approached the topic from two different angles. However, it is worth noting and comment. The more interesting post, to me at least, was from EMC.
Little Bit of Everything
Recently I’ve had more to say than time. So I am taking some time while I watch a little football to comment on various topics. If I get any real feedback on any of these thoughts, I’ll spin it off as a separate post later…
Dialog about Dialog
Well, my post about more dialog got some great reactions. However, dialog about having a dialog isn’t the target. Jesse Wilkins did make an interesting point that people will talk about what interests them. He is exactly right. That is why we need more ECM bloggers. That way we have enough diversity to talk about any ECM topic. Of course, one of my goals is to get everyone to care about ECM standards.
I was very pleased by what I saw. Now let’s see what happens over the next few months as real topics surface.
SharePoint is Lotus Notes?
The ECM Blogsphere
Recently, James wrote expressing his concern that the ECM domain doesn’t seem to collaborate. His opening paragraph was straight to the point is not an entirely inaccurate picture of the ECM industry:
It is plagued by a plethora of disconnected products that don’t integrate well, no notion of patterns or detailed reference architectures or even a consistent definition for what the ECM even contains. There are no standards specific to ECM, none of the vendors collaborate and yet everyone seems comfortable with this fact.
In this one fact I would dispute is the fact that everyone seems comfortable with the status quo. That is both very true and false all at the same time.
Word of Pie 
