ECM Suites

Open Text™ recently announced availability of the latest release of Open Text Web Solutions. Available to customers now, this new release offers a number of additional enhancements to what is already a core strength of Open Text Web Solutions: Helping customers translate, manage and synchronize multiple websites worldwide. Web Solutions is an integral component of the Open Text ECM Suite, the industry's most comprehensive suite of content services used by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews. This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

That was the challenge issued by Intelligent Enterprise magazine. You can judge the results for yourself. To quote: "The cost-effective portal and easily deployed record- and document-management module are among the platform's best features, but Vignette must smooth over disparate infrastructure requirements and stabilize its complex environment."

These past few weeks as I have been working on the ECM Suites Report I pondered what it actually is that makes an ECM tool truly "Enterprise" ready. It can of course mean many things -- from a suite of vaguely-connected products, to a departmental solution that can scale -- but what should it really mean? What, separates a product that can play across the whole enterprise from one that is better suited at a departmental level? If you are looking for an ECM Platform -- something that can be a layer in your Enterprise Architecture and served up as and where needed across your enterprise -- what kind of things are you looking for in a product? It used to be functionality (hence the evolution of ECM Suites), platforms that can theoretically do everything from Imaging, through Records Management, to Digital Asset Management and back. But on closer examination that is not a particularly good way of defining true Enterprise players

Do mid-sized companies and departments want integrated content management and business processing? Longtime CMS vendor RedDot is betting that they do. RedDot has just released a new collaboration and business processing package to join its WCM and portal products. Despite being a homegrown effort, the overall "suite" could be a bit better integrated (e.g. the collaboration and WCM modules use different workflow engines). But on the whole, we find it a useful offering for those smaller firms seeking to combine their e-business and e-content efforts without incurring behemoth software license fees. Just remember that the real costs in these sorts of integrated projects -- regardless of size -- come in the form of consulting and training expenses, long after the software bill is paid...Read about the "Extended Content Management Suite"

TOWER Software: TRIMContext 6     TRIM Context 6, AIIM E-DOC Magazine 2006 Best of Show award winner for ECM Suites, is a unified Enterprise Content Management solution capable of managing and securing the full range of corporate information assets through its complete lifecycle and beyond. In a single application TRIM Context incorporates: Document management, email management, Web content management, collaboration, process management and records management. TOWER Software's TRIM Context 6 solution maintains strict compliance with international legislative and corporate standards, including; US DoD 5015.2-STD, ISO 2788, ISO 15489.1-2002, ISO 15489. 2-2002, TNA (UK) PRO II and AS 4390-1996.TOWER Software 12012 Sunset Hills Road Suite 510 Reston, VA 20190

Today we released a research summary arguing that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) products are ill-equipped to meet the security requirements of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). To quote Alan from the release: "Separating out the SOA hype from the ECM reality remains difficult, as vendors have aggressively positioned their products as SOA-ready -- while most are not....When vendors talk about SOA, they mostly mean that they have SOAP-enabled their APIs, but that's not really the point."Our findings come from the recent release of the ECM Suites Report 2008, which evaluates 30 ECM vendors around the globe.

It just so happens that Interwoven and Vignette are both looking. Vignette's Thomas Hogan is moving on to HP Software (one of the companies occasionally rumored to acquire a content management vendor), while Interwoven's Martin Brauns is retiring, for the 2nd time. Both announcements came today, when simultaneously both companies reported decent Q4 earnings (Vignette, Interwoven), rounding out successive years of steady but very modest growth. Hogan and Braun are respected in the community, but perhaps it's a good time for change at both companies. Neither vendor can seem to break the $200m annual revenue barrier, and as CMS Report readers know, their flagship Web content management tools remain the weaker links in their ECM product suites.

CMS Watch has assigned Stellent various monikers over the years, from "tool maker" to "intranet solution". To the list we now add "puzzler." Stellent recently won AIIM's "Best in Show" Award in the ECM Suite category for the second year in a row. But the company cannot seem to surpass in either sales volume nor market cap its nearest competitors, including those staring down some serious technology challenges (e.g., Interwoven, Vignette, and Hummingbird). Nevertheless, the company retains a generally likable corporate culture: Stellent staffers tend to share a kind of earnest and straightforward style. It is an unfortunate fact of the contemporary software industry, however, that nice guys rarely finish first.

Today Oracle announced the latest upgrade to its flagship database: 11g. The announcement brooks great interest within the ECM community because, as we detail in the ECM Suites Report, so many ECM tools (including all the leading players) utilize the Oracle database. Of particular interest is enhanced support for "LOBs" (Large Objects), such as documents, drawings, images, and so forth. Oracle says 11g can now provide: comparable performance to regular file servers for access to large files greater compression capabilities the ability to encrypt LOBs within the database environmentIt has long been the case that databases were ineffective at handling enterprise documents -- sometimes becoming grindingly slow -- but the performance gap has been closing over the past few years.