ECM capabilities

It’s back again. Alfresco has released its 2008 Open Source Barometer and the results really should not surprise many. Enterprises like mixed technology environments that leverage Windows, Java, rich internet applications with AJAX and integrated Web 2.0 tools. We ran through the results with Alfresco CMO Ian Howells to get the scoop on the key findings and what they mean to Alfresco going forward.

Never one to be left behind when it comes to offering solutions for the most prevalent issues facing enterprises today, IBM has come out with a whole new slew of solutions designed to help get your content under control. Pick just one product or mix and match to suit your business needs. IBM calls it the IBM Content Collection and Archiving Family. It’s a modular set of products based on the IBM ECM platform and designed to take advantage of its capabilities in advanced classification, records management, eDiscovery and search.

Alfresco Software, creator of the open source Alfresco ECM system, has announced that Adobe Systems has implemented Alfresco’s ECM capabilities into the Acrobat.com website. The system will now maintain hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of documents that can be uploaded, shared, converted and collaborated. This marks a giant step forward for Alfresco and all of the open source development community.

Many have ignored (and will continue to ignore) the impact SharePoint has had on dramatically changing the ECM solution model. The effects of this will likely be seen for many years to come. Legacy vendors, in a reactive mode and trying to respond to the unexpected disruption SharePoint has had in the ECM business community, are trying to position themselves as a higher-value, yet complementary (but at a higher price, of course) value add to SharePoint's core ECM capabilities. Submitted by Clearview Software

I am surprised by just how loudly Microsoft's announcements have reverberated within the ECM vendor community. But perhaps what's been most striking is the number of customers that are inquiring and taking serious interest in understanding SharePoint and its ECM capabilities. Submitted by Clearview Software

ECM suite vendors frequently tout the breadth of their capabilities across various functional products, but in fact, they typically excel in only one or two areas. Check out this nice case study in Intelligent Enterprise of an insurance company that works -- successfully -- with 3 different ECM vendors.

On its website, CMS vendor RedDot (now an Open Text subsidiary) points out that 3 years ago we lauded their CMS product for its localization and authoring capabilities. Well, we learn over time as we talk to more customers. And products change over time -- or rather don't always change with the times. So it is with RedDot CMS, whose European customers tell us that its localization capabilities are aging, and its globalization facilities surprisingly underdeveloped. It will be interesting to see whether RedDot can make needed usability improvements over the next year while it tries to reconcile codebases with Open Text's other WCM and ECM tools, and still upgrade its back-end to .NET. You can find more details in The CMS Report.

ECM vendor Stellent announced today a merger with Imaging/DM vendor, Optika. Analysts will tout this match because it fills in holes for each vendor and looks very neat and tidy from the perspective of capabilities checkboxes. We continue to be sceptical of roll-ups (including this one) from the perspective of user value, but you can expect to see more... Read about the merger

If you're currently in the market for a new ECM system or upgrade, chances are you're considering Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as a potential component in the solution. I mean, how can you not be? Microsoft has saturated the market with messaging regarding the ECM capabilities of SharePoint, and traditional ECM vendors seem to be stumbling over themselves in an effort to integrate their legacy applications with the SharePoint platform. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites, either because they want to experiment with the platform, or because the business side is being forced to use it (often under the misimpression that it will be "free"). The latter case is a bit ironic, because for years some enterprise web teams had to put up with bloated Web CMS tools from the likes of Documentum or IBM in a mistaken effort by IT to overreach and standardize on a single ECM supplier. Now we sometimes see IT throwing SharePoint over the wall to the business as almost a kind of abdication of any involvement.But using SharePoint for traditional web publishing is not a trivial undertaking. If you go that route, I'll commend you to a very useful white paper published by our partners at J