- October
- 29
- 2006
EMC Momentum 2006 – SharePoint and Documentum working together, working better
Posted by unclaimed blog
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To present about using SharePoint at EMC's flagship Documentum event is to really ruffle the feathers of the enterprise content management giant. I wasn't too sure of the reception that I would receive stood side by side with Microsoft's SharePoint product manager from the UK. As a customer of both Microsoft's and EMC's though it was plain to see that there was a lot of interest from partners, other customers and EMC themselves in what we had to say.
The crux of the presentation was about using Microsoft SharePoint to provide a more fitting interface into Documentum's content 'engine'. I acknowledge Documentum as a great content repository and the way that it manages the lifecycle of documents keeps EMC ahead in the ECM space (according to Gartner). But one thing that lets the product down and infact any product trying to manage the discipline that is content management is the way that users interact with it. Webtop, the main web-based UI into Documentum, has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years and I saw a presentation of what is to come in the D6 version. It continues to improve, but it's still 'separate' and distinct from where people do the vast majority of their information working with content – namely a corporate portal, the desktop and MS Office. To lift someone out of a corporate portal with the dashboard of information it provides into a different interface, different set of metaphors, different way of organising provides a barrier to adoption and usage. Having invested in a corporate portal, namely SharePoint in my case, and have it not provide a dashboard onto an information worker's worls is not reaping all the benefits. That said, SharePoint 2003 is no document mamagement system. The lack of item level security is enough to dismiss it in any serious document management practice. MOSS 2007 has improved and could meet the requirements of many organisations who need version control, check-in / check-out, security and simple retention policies. However, EMC are still ahead of the game and I still think they have a very strong product. Getting the two to work together, and not just screen-scraping Webtop into SharePoint, is an important task and supports a serious ECM effort.
So the majojrity of the presentation focused on the benefits of investing in technology and processes to provide a great compliance engine in Documentum, with the freeform collaborative and approachable platform that is SharePoint. The immediate benefits were around adoption. People just took to SharePoint faster. The important aspect is maintaining that adoption but still trying to weave in the discipline of document management – metadata, workflow, achiving, compliance. How can you leverage seamless integration into the creation toolset of Microsoft Office but still have documents that are treated as records from the outset. That is still the challenge, but products from companies such as Vorsite and Wingspan provide the key. Each have their merits, each have some drawbacks.
The presentation itself is avaialble at http://www.momentumlive.com/momentum2006/rome/home.aspx. You'll need to have attended the event to know the password.
There was a massive amount of interest in this topic so expect to see much more happening in this space. EMC themselves announced that in the D6 timeframe (sometime Q2 07) they will release their own SharePoint integrations to work with MOSS 2007. This shows that EMC are serious about working with Microsoft and MOSS rather than putting their head in the sand like they've done in the past. Dave DeWalt, head of EMC's software division and previously CEO of Documentum, mentioned in his keynote that a 'UI-less' approach from EMC was a key component of their strategy. To me this aligns with what Microsoft are doing with SAP with the Mendocino initiative and products such as Duet. Organisations acknowledge EMC and SAP as providing good 'engines' for content and business processes, but both of those companies provide shocking UI's. Adoption is weak at best and users can both make mistakes and waste time. Microsoft are currently not just kings of the desktop, but kings of the UI in the business arena. Microsoft Office is incredibly powerful in the way that users don't have to be trained to do basic operations. SharePoint and MOSS 2007 are similar in the portal world.
Lots of customers of EMC's came to talk to me offline after the presentation and feel them same way.
