ECM tools

Since HP acquired Tower Software almost a year ago, I thought it about time to review progress to date. Well that and that fact that I typically eat Saturday breakfast with my daughter Fiona at a diner called The Spa in Pepperell, MA - and (small world that it is) so does one of our key contacts at HP. Oddly enough though we have never actually met each other at The Spa despite us both being regulars. I think there may be a parallel analogy with HP in the world of ECM. For despite them being there and being an active part of it, I seldom seem to bump into them.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology goes back around 30 years, and at it's heart lies document management and workflow. The technology 30 years on is faster, more scalable, easier to use and deploy, but essentially the same in principal as it was back in the day.

In the past year, product vendors across the ECM spectrum -- from portals to document management to web content management -- have picked up on the demand for collaborative tools. After all, what is an "enterprise" document, a corporate website, an Intranet dashboard, if not a collaborative venture? Witness Documentum buying eRoom, Stellent building its own tools, and now Interwoven collaborating with iManage (which IWOV is presenting as a DM solution). CMS vendors, as always, will have problems integrating disparate content repositories, and the tools are still a bit weak in terms of realtime collaboration. Also, this is an area where the platform vendors (especially Oracle and Microsoft) are staking a major claim. All this makes buyer choices more interesting...Read about the new Interwoven-iManage alliance

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

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.

InputAccel Express is a document capture solution ideal for departmental and small to midsize business needs. InputAccel Express is an affordable and effective alternative to EMC Captiva's enterprise-level capture solution, InputAccel, and provides all the necessary tools for quickly and easily transforming paper documents into streamlined digital content for enterprise applications and databases, including ECM, ERP, CRM, and other systems.

Actually, in some places it's already arrived. In a recent AIIM E-Doc article, Alan and I explore the pros and cons of some newer configuration interfaces that enable businesspeople to take greater control over their Web CMS and ECM implementations. To quote:While this isn't an entirely new problem, the proliferation of Web application layers across nearly all content and document technologies has simultaneously introduced a new fragility to these tools along with a tacit expectation among business managers that they should be modifiable in "Web-time."Indeed, but there are consequences to modifying applications willy-nilly. At the end of the day, you still need configuration management...just a different kind.

CMS vendor Percussion is pitching their latest Version 6.0 of Rhythmyx not so much as an ECM product solution – but as the core of an interoperability strategy that enables ECM. This seems like a smart approach for a niche solution. The company has added a WSDK (Web Services Software Developer's Kit) and web services API, making it easier to pull and push content into and out of the Rhythmyx repository. Percussion also productized a WYSIWYG web forms tool (à la Ektron) previously developed by a channel partner. That all sounds good, but Rhythmyx V6 doesn't actually release until the end of July and it will be some months before Percussion's customers have put it through its paces. We'll let you know...

Over the years we've helped many enterprises select appropriate content technologies -- be it a Web CMS, Portal, Search tool, or a larger ECM Suite. We're now also pleased to offer Web Analytics advisory services (for buyers only, of course). If you're managing a Web Analytics program and want to optimize its value, educate key decision makers about web analytics, or make the right technology purchase decision, we can help. Just drop me a note.