ECM News Radar

I recently advised a global consumer goods firm about how to integrate their various Social Software implementations and where to place SharePoint in that mix. This was that rare company who had not yet implemented SharePoint hardly at all, beyond a few WSS pilots. In other words, that mythical "greenfield" environment that consultants can dream about, but rarely exist in real life. The firm is considering expanding their investment, including licensing MOSS. We discussed how they have a tremendous opportunity to do SharePoint "right" from the beginning, and avoid some common critical mistakes.

A new CMS Watch eport shows the growing importance of Enterprise Content Management in an increasingly mobile world. Blame the BlackBerry or the iPhone, but a generation of users are expecting all the data they are used to seeing on the desktop to be available on their mobile devices as well. This evolution in working style frames part of the 2009 ECM report from CMS Watch that highlights the move to mobile. If you want to understand the ECM market, then CMS Watch's 436 report is a very good place to start. Featuring 10-20 page reports on each of the major ECM vendors, it is designed to help readers save money on contracts, save time when shortlisting and choosing vendors, and prevent purchasing mistakes.

Today we released a major update to our Enterprise Content Management technology evaluations. Our release highlights some important trends, most notably some new mobile interfaces coming down the pike. Our team will share some more details about those trends in the coming weeks. Meantime, if you're a subscriber, you'll receive your updated edition shortly. If not, and you want the inside story on ECM vendor pros and cons, you can purchase the report here, and you can always check out a free sample first.

With titles such as Madden NFL 10, Rock Band and Sims in its portfolio, video game developer Electronic Arts has to stay on cool's edge -- inside the company as much as out. "When people come in the door here these days, they say, 'Hey, how do I connect with people? Do you have a social network?' " said Bert Sandie, director of technical excellence in the University Group at Electronic Arts (EA) in Vancouver. "The reality is, having a social network , search and a knowledge portal, especially in larger corporations, is essentially becoming the cost of doing business, like email was 20 years ago."

A report from TowerGroup titled "Beyond the Paper Scourge: Unleashing the Business Value of Electronic Content Management" was recently released on MarketResearch.com. The report covers topics such as: How ECM Works, Unleashing the Business Value of ECM, Innovation in ECM, Supporting Technologies for ECM, and Outlook for ECM Vendors.Some of the claims include:ECM enhances business value by improving operational efficiency, customer experience, compliance, and risk management.ECM spans diverse technology categories that fit together strategically under an umbrella of business process transformation.Many FSIs use some form of ECM solutions, but these solutions often do not connect with other supporting technologies and fall short of the mark in delivering full business value.Innovation in ECM lies in preserving information in its original digital form and in its ability to move information through a process, be stored, and be accessed digitally.

Digitech Systems, a provider of on-demand ECM, recently announced that they have significantly pumped up their PaperVision Capture. PaperVision Capture allows businesses to design processes for capturing paper documents and converting them to an electronic format. Users can index them for secure storage, management and retrieval within an ECM system. The fresh squeezed features include OCR processing, which automatically processes image files, including paper documents converted to electronic format from a scanner or MFP, into searchable indexed files.

In theory, these things strike many as a good idea. And, most notably, they might actually be. But they also strike fear in the hearts of CIOs world-wide. Is the cloud secure? Is the cloud compliant? Is the cloud performant enough not to frustrate the entire company?And then beyond these questions, there are the economic realities.SaaS vendors argue that their approach saves you money. Start-up costs are certainly lower, but long term TCO may be another story. The scenario needs to be modeled for your specific organization, if you want to decide with confidence.

Alfresco Software, the leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM), recently announced the expansion of its North and South American partner program for system integrators (SI) in response to increasing demand. As open source economics continue to create new opportunities for SIs, the lack of upfront license fees for Alfresco ECM also enables enterprise customers to fund more projects and allocate more budget and resources to project delivery.

Everybody is talking about how to use cloud computing to do more, spend less and bring more zenful moments to your IT department.  But how do the economics of Software as a Service (SaaS) work when compared to traditional deployed software?Yes, there are the obvious points (no servers, wee!). But there are also more subtle bits to the equation.If this is your cup-o-tea, join in this Thursday at 1pm Eastern time for a complimentary one-hour live webinar. The host will be Dan Carmel, a respected content management authority.

Migrating existing content into a SharePoint system, and specifically into a SharePoint Page Library — the foundation of a SharePoint Publishing website — is neither simple nor straightforward.To migrate content into SharePoint we took a look at a number of tools, both commercial tools and custom-built ones paired with a data aggregation framework. Here is a review of our experience, a summary of our final approach and some postmortem thoughts.

Since my old company, Document Sciences, was bought by EMC, I have been following the Enterprise Content Management market closely; The Fortune 500 have invested billions of dollars in databases and ERP technologies leading to multi-billion dollar franchises such as Oracle, SAP, etc. focused on the structured data world. However, the next frontier of productivity will come from the unstructured data that includes your emails, you-tube videos, word document, power point presentations, pictures, etc.

There are a few simple web content management systems available today. Cushy CMS, Clover and Surreal are three super simple systems that come to mind when we look at PageLime. PageLime is a hosted web content management solution that let's you very easily add content management to your website without making a lot changes. Just give them FTP access to your site, mark up your pages with some CSS classes and you are off to the races. Add Content Management QuicklyYou may have built your website thinking you didn't need — or want — content management. But, like most, you have found that the need to keep updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant is becoming a bit of a pain in the you know what.

IT management software company CA , along with interactive marketing company Acxiom have set out to produce an enterprise class, cloud-based information governance solution. This new partnership aims to tap into the blossoming eDiscovery market by providing a solution that both companies say cannot be beaten for value.The timing of this announcement is interesting considering Arkansas-based Acxiom is just about to release its Q1 figures, which it has already indicated in June would be close to 21% lower than Q1 last year. Market RealitiesAcxiom’s figures are interesting not so much because of the amount of money involved, but because one of the principal reasons they are citing for income decline.According to a statement issued in June, “The outlook for revenue in the near term remains challenging  [as we] continue to feel the effects of market consolidation, as well as clients continuing to defer decisions on their marketing spending or canceling programs …" GA_googleFillSlot("Inline-300x250--01");

Ohio-based Hyland Software has announced that it has launched its SaaS enterprise content management system OnBase in Europe with its first operation centre already opened in London. As a specialist in medical document management, they really couldn’t have picked a better location as the English National Health Service, like its counterparts across Europe, are just about bankrupt and will be in the market for any solution that will cut costs. Hyland's OnBase enterprise content management suite provides integrated document management, business process management and records management in a single application and can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted solution.

Yes, it's true, the open source enterprise content management system that seems to live to support just about any environment has added another server to the list. Alfresco (news, site) has announced that their Community Edition 3.2 can now be easily installed on Ubuntu Server Edition, free! Alfresco just released the Community Edition 3.2 earlier this month. The latest version of the community edition of their open source enterprise content management software also includes some updated records management capabilities, improved Forms, IMAP support and a nice solution for the iPhone.

BlueModus today unveiled its Content Management System (CMS) solution designed to increase flexibility and scalability of website content control, from simple editing capabilities to enterprise-level solutions. "More than ever, content control and change responsiveness are vital to growing businesses of all sizes," said BlueModus President David Baumgarten. "Our custom-tailored CMS solution takes web content control to new heights. "Our CMS is fully configurable, and brings website control back in-house, with truly limitless possibilities. When we determine what our customers want, we build it – and make it work." BlueModus, which recently designed customized CMS solutions for Cisco and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, provides ongoing training and support services. Catering to the digital and interactive professional, as well as the non-technical user, BlueModus' CMS solution provides businesses and its partners with the ability to develop a tiered support system, ensuring speed of implementation, rapid development, and the ability to evolve.

SpringCM Inc., the leader in on-demand document management and workflow solutions, recently announced the immediate availability of the newest version of its SaaS-based enterprise content management platform. The new release contains 36 new features and enhancements designed to improve management visibility into content processes and the packaging and delivery of SpringCM based applications by partners. Major new features introduced in this release of the SpringCM platform include: Custom Dashboards – This feature adds new graphical reporting capabilities and enables SpringCM users to configure the SpringCM dashboard contents and layout to match the needs of a specific application. Any SpringCM custom report may now be displayed as part of a dashboard and users may choose from several different layout options for how these reports are displayed on the page. Together these enhancements provide new real-time insights into content processes and the status of individual or group metrics.

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

Earlier this year AIIM released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently.Hardly a day goes by that we don't find ourselves covering some of the eight facts about document management that he raises. Three of these in particular, strike a chord with us, as we are sure they do with you.Email ExposureLegal DiscoverySharePoint Deployments

It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.According to the report: The Forrester Wave(TM): Records Management, Q2 2009, a number of key enterprise content management vendors lead the wave for records management including Open Text, IBM, EMC and Oracle. Autonomy and CA are also leaders, with Interwoven and HP noted as strong performers.