Microsoft SharePoint, what more is there to say?
A couple months ago, Gartner released their annual ECM Magic Quadrant (which I looked at). Sure enough, being an odd year, Forrester released their ECM Wave. I see the pros of waiting two years as the larger vendors take that long, or longer, for a significant release. On the other hand, you have longer to wait for new members to show up.
Well not in Forrester’s world. Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I didn’t get to go to the SharePoint conference this year, or any other year for that matter, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t represented. My company sent three people, including Jed Carr, our SharePoint Solution Lead. After much cajoling, I convinced him to share his thoughts on the conference for everyone to enjoy.
So without further ado…here’s Jed.
Anytime you get a chance to go to Vegas, it usually turns out to be a good time. This trip, although work related, was no different…plus it was free. My company flew me out and put me up for this year’s SharePoint Conference. Overall, I thought Mandalay did a great job of managing the 7000+ attendees, most of which really wanted to be there. Also, to my surprise, I barely managed to miss a session. I thought there would be more down time, but every time a session ended, I usually found another one I didn’t want to miss.
[Note that my post on the 2010 Quadrant is now available.]
Thanks to the Documentum voters splitting their time between two topics, discussing the recent Gartner MQ for ECM is today’s topic. The voting was an interesting little diversion that I’ll revisit later.
I’m going to talk about the report here. The recent controversy around Gartner is a post for another day.
Last year I was threatened (my word) by Gartner for putting a copy of the MQ here. I was also chastised for several other nitpicks. So I will only link to Oracle’s courtesy copy of the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management this year to avoid wrath.
One thing to remember is Gartner really doesn’t want you to compare a vendor’s location in the MQ from year to year. That is both well-advised and unrealistic. To be fair, as the measurements and industry change, scores change. Movement isn’t just dependent on vendor action, or inaction.
However, we are human and we like to perform comparisons. I have a copy to perform the comparison for my own interest. The link I had online to last year’s report is no longer valid, so you’ll have to take my Word on it.
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.
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.
Enterprise 2.0 is a growing theme out there in the wild of the Internet. This is especially true in the world of ECM where vendors are looking to add all those “Web 2.0” features to their platforms. EMC, Open Text, and IBM are all releasing new “Enterprise 2.0” products. It is a smart play because people with ECM and collaboration tools are looking to their vendors to provide the newest Enterprise 2.0 features in the “next upgrade”.
AIIM saw this trend a while ago and did some research. In May, AIIM updated their research. I was “lucky” enough (lucky being defined as someone who follows AIIM leaders on Twitter and clicks on links) to get an early copy of the results, AIIM Industry Watch: Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0, on Friday before the general announcement of availability. I thought I would share what I found.
Apologies to Andrew on this post, but I’ve got to get everything out of my system before I learn anything new NDA items about the two products working together. I think EMC is moving in right direction on these products, but they aren’t there yet. That being said, their current approach is easily the best that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.
Before you read this post, read my EMC World notes on SharePoint Repository Services and Content Services for SharePoint. That should help with the background.
Erin Samuels is going to be presenting on the other half of the SharePoint offering. Andrew was going to speak, but everyone voted against it due to the potential lawsuit after the abuse he doled out yesterday. He is present and will probably speak despite our best efforts.
Andrew Chapman is presenting and is displaying his sense of humor. The Slide title is “COM Based DCML API Implementation Models for Visual Basic Development Environments”. I suspect that is a an actual title from an old Developer Conference presentation.
I started this to talk about some of the things out there, but there is sooo much that I am drawing the line. Kas is writing some good things on CMIS as he attempts to grok it. Others, like Jon Marks, are grappling with CMIS as well. They raise some excellent points that probably deserve posts unto themselves. I find myself, today, focusing on the more immediate and of the more “outside-the-box” thoughts.
Word of Pie 