ECMWise: The Content Management Blog

Alfresco ECM Online Demo

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 15:13:00 +0000

Alfresco ECM Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 15:12:00 +0000

What is EDMS and how it benefits your business?

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sat, 11 Apr 2015 09:04:00 +0000

1 What is EDMS

An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is a software system for organizing and storing different kinds of documents and contents (e.g. word, excel, PowerPoint, PDF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DWG, MPEG, MP4, WMV, MP3) in a single repository. EDMS refers more specifically to a software system that handles digital documents, rather than paper documents, although in some instances, these systems may also handle digital scanned versions of original paper documents.

The Electronic Document Management System helps users to organize, store, share and retrieve digital documents in a controlled environment. The EDMS system is fully auditable to ensure documents and information stored in digital repository is only accessed by authorized users.

2 Why companies use EDMS

The reasons for using EDMS are compelling:

Improve access to records and information – authorized users can search across the unit, department or even access documents maintained by other agencies with a single search query. Workflow can automatically notify internal or external users when needed information has arrived or has been processed.
Improve customer service – retained or in-process information can be immediately accessed. Accessed information can be faxed or emailed to the customer from the desktop.
Reduce queue time – information can be routed electronically using email or workflow eliminating mailing and transport activities.
Minimize duplication – a single copy of a document can be made available to all authorized users, including those outside the agency.
Decrease data keying requirements – forms processing and eforms can access current data via lookups and export form data directly to business applications.
Reduce storage and retrieval expense – a single repository reduces the need to store multiple copies while standardized indexing and integration with business applications allows users to instantly access needed documents or other information.
Automate business processes – workflow can be used to move information from one step to another. Rules based routing can automatically determine needed activity and work steps. Work object or referenced data can automatically update business applications, create additional documents or workflows, and communicate with internal and external users.
Improve regulatory compliance – technologies can create audit trails of access and activity. Compliance with Records Retention Schedules can be automated and improved. Incoming documents can be automatically classified and stored in the system
Enable reuse of information – Previously processed information can b used to prepopulate forms or validate and standardize incoming data.
Improve quality of data – use of automated filling and validation capabilities of eforms reduce the potential for missing or misplaced data. Features like auto-formatting, required fields, standardized selections, and dynamic form configuration validate data prior to submission reducing re-work and time-consuming correction processes.
Share information with external entities – existing information collections can be directly accessed by authorized external user.
Support external processing – external users can access the system, scanning, indexing, storing, and retrieving documents in a central repository.
Increased information security – documents and information stored in the EDMS is protected from unauthorized access by stringent security requirements. Backups provide vital records and disaster recovery protections. Protection by duplication is easily achieved using either offsite copies or system generated microfilm.

3 Benefits of EDMS in an organization

3.1 Risk Mitigation

3.1.1 Avoid Document/information loss

· Companies usually practice physical storage of documents, while only few documents are scanned and stored on file servers. Physical documents are hard to find and sometime get misplaced, file servers are not reliable either due to lack of security.

· Converting important documents into electronic format (pdf or TIFF) using scanner/MFP and managing them using the EDMS system will avoid information loss as the indexed electronic copy is hard to misplace and easy to find in a secured environment.

3.1.2 Ensure Latest information/document is available

· Companies usually practice manual version management for keeping track of changes in documents while in review by multiple stakeholders. Often documents are also lying in individual’s personal computers, laptop or email, making it hard to asses as which copy is final.

· Automatic Version creation and management feature of EDMS will eliminate error-prone manual process and will ensure employees get latest version/copy of documents in electronic format with date & time stamp of updated/modified time, thus avoiding risk of outdated informed being used in projects.

3.1.3 Ensure Document retention / avoid cost of compliance

· Scanning and converting historical documents into electronic format and maintaining them in EDMS system will ensure documents are retained for as long as required and shall ensure compliance of retaining documents for contract period.

3.2 Cost Benefits

3.2.1 Savings on managing documents – manual vs. electronic

Managing documents in physical form consumes space, labor and cost. Clearing workspace of documents which are no longer actively used in business, converting and storing them in electronic format in EDMS and housing such physical documents in a warehouse will result in cost savings.

3.2.2 Saving of paper/printing cost and logistics/transit cost

· Everyday printing, photocopying and couriering the documents to various offices and sub-contractors for review and approval purpose results in cost. Often the documents have multiple review cycles and are not required to be printed, unless they reach the final stage.

· EDMS can help companies save on the above said cost by the way of electronic sharing and review/commenting feature while the documents are in draft and review stage. Only final approved copy needs to be printed for signature by the authorized person.

3.3 Operational Efficiency

3.3.1 Immediate access/fast retrieval of latest information/documents

· Companies can maintain all sort of engineering and corporate documents e.g. drawings, contracts, financial documents in single EDMS system and find at a click using the keyword-based indexing and search feature of EDMS, rather than going through the bulk of physical files.

· Documents of various subsidiaries and sub-contractors can be stored in a single EDMS repository and in structured format, which will result in users having information at a click accessible across offices and even at vessels leading to user productivity gains.

3.3.2 Easy & secured sharing of documents across teams and subsidiaries

· The collaboration feature of EDMS will help companies in sharing the documents in electronic format across various teams and subsidiaries, instead of sending them via courier or emails.

· Online sharing of documents like drawings, contracts, manuals etc. via EDMS is secure, decreases burden on email server and offers more features like commenting on documents while in review.

3.3.3 Electronic Review and approval of documents with collaboration features

· Workflow feature of EDMS will help companies to improve on staff productivity, shorten document review and approval cycles by the way of setting rules and deadlines for review and approval.

· Apart from automating engineering documents review and approval, transmittal management, Workflow feature can also be rolled-out to automate other corporate business processes in future like invoice approval, PO approval, claims reimbursement etc.

EMC Q4 2012 results: IIG/Documentum disappoints fans

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 08:35:00 +0000

EMC has announced the Q4 2012 results on Jan 29, 2013. I was curious to know about IIG/Documentum's performance in the year 2012 and as expected it disappointed the Documentum fans.

While EMC has registered a 9% Y/Y positive growth, IIG has registered approximately -3% negative growth compare to 2011. Though the year has been eventful for IIG wherein they acquired Syncplicity and announced major releases of Captiva (7.0) and Documentum (7.0) and xCP (2.0), but it didn't really translate into $$$ to keep the financial strength up for IIG, which might be worry-some for Documentum customers and partners once again about it's future within EMC.

Following is the comparison chart of EMC IIG earnings for year 2011 and 2012, which translates that they have performed poorly both on product revenue as well as consulting revenue front.

Few more interesting points I've noted from EMC CFO presentation is that:
1. Slide 5: EMC's focus in only on Cloud and big data and Content Management doesn't exist anywhere in the commentary.
2. Slide 10: Though APJ region only accounts for only 14% revenue, but the Y/Y growth is highest at 19%, where IIG has not registered any significant Documentum deal in year 2012.

I also came to know from reliable sources that SourceOne (S1) and Kazeon are no more a part of IIG offerings and has been moved to backup and recovery division. Does this translate into IIG's exit from archiving and eDiscovery offering, or is it just an internal arrangement to get rid of less-revenue making products from IIG's portfolio.

So the future of Documentum remains unclear within EMC and year 2013 will be deciding period for its future while the tough competition remains from big players like Oracle, OpenText, FileNet and emerging regional players.

EMC releases ECM product upgrades: Will it help the slubering Documentum market?

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 07:34:00 +0000

EMC has recently announced new releases of Documentum and Captiva products at its annual customer and partner conference Momentum Vienna 2012. This is possibly the most fitting reply by EMC IIG to Oracle's accusations of 'Documentum' not being innovative in Oct 2011 (refer to Oracle's webinar and Jeetu Patel's blog).

Without naming anyone, Rohit Ghai, VP & GM IIG Product group has hit back at Oracle in his technical keynote address by saying that while EMC has successfully provided integrated solution portfolio by launching Documentum 7, Captiva 7, xCP 2.0, D2 4.0 and Document Sciences 4.5, other vendors are busy doing acquisitions and not able to provide integrated solutions to customers.

The partner and customer community has welcomed EMC's continued commitment for investing into its information intelligence suite of products and has weakened the rumors of a possible sell-off of a slumbering business unit.

While a great product is maturing further technically, there are still concerns though which have not been addressed in IIG president Rick's keynote address as to how are they going to address the problem of slumbering Documentum sales and address the concerns of its near-frustrated partner community.

EMC OnDemand might be a good news for the customer community which can help reduce the TCO and deployment time, but there is no word on its competition with on-premises solutions offered by partners, since my assumption is that OnDemand will be offered directly by EMC sales folks or EMC will share little incentive with partners for selling OnDemand solutions. Read on for quick summary of new releases and some more thoughts.

Documentum 7: EMC claims this release will allows customers to realize faster time to value on their ECM investments, 10x faster deployments, up to 8X better price to performance and the Best ECM platform for private cloud. Further improves security through FIPS 140-2 Level 1 compliance and 128-bit AES encryption. Finally a new xCelerated Management System (xMS) technology with advanced capabilities to simplify and accelerate the deployment of Documentum into VMware-based private-cloud environments to get rid of complex deployment process.

EMC claims Documentum 7 can deliver up to 50% lower CPU utilization over the previous version, utilize up to 55% less memory at scale, and can offer an up to 6x improvement in user load – all with up to 3-5x improvement in end-user response time, which is good news for customers since this has been one of biggest complaint that Documentum is very resource intensive and needs more hardware compare to its competitor products.

Missing: Quite surprisingly though, there is no mention of the RESTful services support in D7 which had limited release with D6.7. Also there is no word on the NGIS-Next Generation Information Server, something that the developer community might be looking forward for.

xCP 2.0: EMC's case management platform/BPM platform has evolved a lot in last couple of years. Since the whole notion of content centric application is fading and the customers are demanding for solutions to their problem rather than buying a product or a platform, EMC seems to be listening. In xCP 2.0, EMC claims to provide industry’s first unified solution design tool for increased agility and up to 50% faster time to value to build advanced, innovative business process automation solutions across multiple industries.

By bringing together content, process and business analytics, xCP 2.0 embeds Big Data within business processes and provides insight to drive better decisions and outcomes.

Missing: The new design tool and a fully-customizable UI means the time for much-hyped Taskspace is over and there doesn't seem to be a migration tool/upgrade path from Taskspace to the new xCP 2.0 UI. This can be a real shock to many customers, who have built critical business application on the top of Taskspace. They need to spent additional efforts and money to re-develop the application, if they wish to upgrade to xCP 2.0.

Captiva 7: This new release provides advanced capabilities for intelligent enterprise capture, business productivity and improved organizational agility. Captiva 7.0 introduces new features, including the Captiva Designer, Captiva Desktop and significant improvements to Captiva Advanced Recognition.

For organizations with global operations, Captiva 7.0 supports multilingual content, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Production Auto-learning (PAL) feature is filed for patent, good news for EMC investors. WYSIWYS (Snippet functionality for indexing) is good news for end-users/indexing operators.

Missing: During my discussion with Rohit Ghai, VP & GM EMC IIG Product group sometime back, he mentioned that Captiva 7 might not require an RDBMS to run, just like Captiva 5.3 used to store the data in flat files. I think EMC was planning to embed xDB engine in Captiva 7 to store settings data and indexing values, since Captiva doesn't really store huge amount of data and a lightweight XML database would be good enough to cater to the need. This can provide real cost benefit to customers by reducing the need of Microsoft SQL Server licenses and simplify the deployment process. But I didn't come across information about that expected change in the product release summary or in Rohit Ghai's technical keynote address. Arabic language support is also missing disappointing its large MEA user-base.

Few more items where there are less talks:

What is the future of MyDocumentum Suite (Connectors for Outlook, SharePoint, Desktop and Offline)? My sources confirm that this product family might be discontinued and EMC Consulting will release substitute products starting with SDF (SharePoint - Documentum framework).
No discussion on eRoom or Centerstage: Is EMC shunning the collaboration strategy or are they only relying on D2?
Webtop has certainly had its life, time to move on. No mention of Webtop in any key session, though EMC is expected to release a service pack in Q3 2013 to provide latest browser and OS support. Means customers can choose to stay on to Webtop atleast for next couple of years and get support from EMC.

Rick made a clever move by acquiring Syncplicity and by embedding Big Data analytics in xCP 2.0. By doing this he ensured IIG is aligned well with overall EMC direction, which is Cloud and Big Data and possibly gave more time to IIG to survive with EMC, though he might get criticized for not strengthening the collaboration and WCM offerings of Documentum.

Overall there was lots of excitement for customers and developers in this launch, but there was less food for partner community, which continues to face competition from IBM, Oracle, OpenText, Alfresco and more disappointingly from EMC IIG consulting team itself.

Feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

Gartner’s 2012 ECM Magic Quadrant: Quick Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 08:59:00 +0000

Gartner has recently released much expected ECM Magic Quadrant for 2012. There are quite a few interesting facts to note. In my earlier post Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2012: What to expect? just before the Gartner release, I had predicted IBM to be on the top of chart in terms of ability to execute and Gartner proved me right. But I was wrong in predicting the visionary position for Microsoft, which went to IBM followed by Oracle. Gartner gave credit to IBM's overall business alignment with its ECM offerings, wherein Oracle gained the position due to its acquisitions, mainly FatWire and the ability to better align its acquisitions with overall business strategy.

There is disappointment though for Microsoft and EMC fans in ECM Magic Quadrant 2012
despite EMC IIG CMO Mr. Jeetu Patel making dedicated efforts to improve analysts ratings. Microsoft's SharePoint story seems to be losing steam. Finally customers and analysts have started realizing that Microsoft never focused on making SharePoint a robust ECM solution. Microsoft is known for making solutions with nice user interface (they deserve due credit for giving Windows OS to the world, else DOS would have never helped IT this much) and SharePoint undoubtedly has a user friendly interface.
We can classify SharePoint as a nice collaboration solution and a 'good' DMS solution, but I don't think it can be categorized as a full-fledged ECM solution. The lack of native functionalities in the areas of administration, backup and recovery, workflow, WCM, replication, mobile support and broad usability were the major concerns cited by Gartner (I just wonder why does Gartner even includes SharePoint into ECM MQ after citing all these weaknesses which are core of ECM and how it gained the top spot in 2010 ECM MQ?).

Microsoft's frequent architecture changes are also the major concern for user's annoyance which makes upgrade difficult. Remember SharePoint was a Portal Server in 2003 (SPS 2003), then it became MOSS 2007 and then SharePoint 2010 and now upcoming SharePoint 2013. The evolution is a good thing, but Microsoft should learn from the failure of IBM FileNet wherein many customers migrated to other ECM systems (primarily to SharePoint) due to the complex and expensive upgrade process from Panagon to P8. The trend might reverse if Microsoft doesn't address the challenge in its upcoming release.

I have visited the benefits page on Microsoft SharePoint website and noted that Microsoft is emphasizing only on the collaboration benefits of SharePoint namely (1) Share (2) Organize (3) Discover (4) Build (5) Manage. The new feature in SharePoint 2013 will be the ability to build Apps for SharePoint, but ECM features are virtually missing from the benefits page. Its evident that the decision to focus on Apps is very much driven from the success story of Apple AppStore, which makes sense commercially.

The next to disappoint is EMC (Documentum). Once the market leader and the trendsetter for ECM is slumbering. It has been consistently performing behind IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in visionary block for the last 3 years. But the bigger surprise came this year when Gartner rated it below lesser-known ECM vendor Hyland Software in terms of ability to execute. Gartner cited lack of ECM business alignment within EMC with its core storage business and inconsistent product strategy for Social Content Management as the major cause of concerns.

Not just that Gartner also sees erosion in EMC Documentum business due to high cost, product complexity and weak sales and marketing efforts, which is not a good sign either for its IIG division or for its business partners. It also gives strength to speculations about the future of Documentum with EMC.

EMC is organizing its annual user and partner conference Momentum Europe in Vienna in few days from now and analysts will have a keen eye on the announcements made, which will decide the future of Documentum. And possibly this will be the last chance of EMC IIG President Rick Devenuti to give some confidence to users and partners, if Documentum is here to stay.

Feel free to comment on the story.

8 Steps guide to make your ECM project a success

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 07:29:00 +0000

As per Gartner Research Vice President Tony Bell "more than 50 percent of large Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects fail if less than six months are spent on vendor choice and planning." (source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10357858-16.html).

So if more than half of the ECM projects fail, its a big reason to worry for those who are planning to acquire an ECM system by spending few hundred thousands dollars. ECM projects usually get initiated with great enthusiasm to save on costs and increase user productivity by the way of reducing paper usage and creating a digital repository of all contents for easier sharing amongst users. The adventure often ends-up with frustration of having a non-usable system which now stores everything but is tool slow and too complex for daily usage. Increased complexity and decreased performance of accessing contents compare to shared drives results in everyday escalations by end-users and business managers giving nightmares to IT managers.
So what should the CIO or IT Manager do right to avoid such a fiasco?I have summarized my experience below in 8 bullet points which can help you increase your chances of success.

1. Assess your business needs: It's important to know what does the business needs? ECM is a vast subject from capture to store/manage to process till archive and disposition and every piece of information which gets generated during the course of business activities comes within the scope of ECM. Starting from writing an email to your customer or vendor to receiving a fax till signing a contract or agreement.
Hence the most critical stage of planning for ECM acquisition is to know as to what all ECM components do you need (from capture (OCR or ICR), repository, process/workflow, compliance, dynamic security, e-discovery etc), what all information should reside in your ECM repository and what must be excluded. The answer should be best left to the business managers or the department heads to carefully analyze and decide. The ideal approach should be to include the minimum and the focus should be on excluding as much as possible, else you risk creating an information junkyard where everyone throws their usable and non-usable documents. This will serve no purpose and will be unfriendly for the end-users.

2. Appoint a consultant: If your organization doesn't have people experienced in implementing ECM solutions or with adequate knowledge on ECM solutions and its fitment into business, its wise to spend a fraction of your budget and appoint a professional to advise you on assessing your ECM needs, drafting them in a professional manner, helping you evaluate the right solution and guiding the shortlisted vendor to ensure successful implementation.

3. Pick the right solution: It's not easy to pick the right solution at a time there are hundreds of solutions available to choose from everyone claiming to be the market leader. We broadly categorize ECM solutions in three segments:

The minimal solution: As the name suggests, the minimal solution is the one which caters to your bare minimum requirements as on today, but doesn't really guarantee the scalability to meet future requirements of your growing business. The advantage of such solution is that this is usually less-expensive and simple solution recommended for beginners. The biggest disadvantage is that such a solution might not be scalable putting organizations at risk of migrating to another solution once the need grows. An example of such a solution can be a simple DMS system which can store various type of generic file formats and provides common library functions like checkin/checkout and versioning.
Comfort zone solution: Comfort zone solution is the one which meets all your requirements at present both technically and financially with the possibility of scaling up to some extent in future. Organizations across world mostly evaluate the solutions keeping their comfort zone in mind. Such solution will have longer self-life compare to the minimal solutions.
Best Practices Solution: Best practices solutions are mature solutions which are robust, scalable and reliable, though might not be affordable by majority of the organizations. Such solutions are often componentized and can be deployed in phases.

4. Choose the right implementation Partner: I happen to arrange a site visit for one of our prospective ECM customer to our existing ECM customer in banking domain. The prospective customer delegation knew very little about ECM and wanted to hear from another bank CIO on their experience of implementing and using the ECM system in banking environment. I was clueless as what my existing customer is going to say about our services, but the experience turned out to be good. The enthusiastic CIO took to the white board and started explaining as why they failed in their ECM implementation initially and how they corrected themselves after realizing the mistakes to achieve success. The 3 broad points he made were:

Technology does matter, so chose the right platform as per your growing business needs. A minimum solution might put you in a fix with-in next 12 months or a best-practices enterprise-scale solution can be too expensive to afford for business.
More than the technology, it's the right vendor you need to select, who doesn't just understands the platform you are buying, but also understands your business processes i.e. the domain experience plays a vital role during implementation, else you will waste lots of time on educating the developers about your business and still might get there. Managers in your organization spent years understanding your process in right way, so don't expect developers to master that art in few weeks.
Educate your end-user, send the right message: They need to embrace the technology to realize benefits of investment and increase the productivity and it can't be the other way around. You need to find your change management champion/influencer amongst users who can drive the team forward.

5. Pilots vs. large-scale implementation: You maybe be acquiring the best of breed solution from the most successful IT vendor, but that doesn't guarantee the success of same solution in your business environment. Every business is different and so as the behavior of end-users in each organization. Often the acquisition approach adopted by organizations includes calling the interested vendors for a presentation and then a formal bid during which they demonstrate the proof-of-concept (PoC) to confirm the fitment with desired technical and functional requirements. Usually the most competent vendor with lowest bid gets the project award. While there is no flaw in this process, more can be done to protect your interest before you sell-out money.

PoC is the demonstration of solution with minor tweaks to confirms the fact that the solution does have required ingredients to meet desired technical and business requirements. The PoC system gets scrapped post demonstration and the enterprise-wide implementation starts which is often completely different from what the evaluation committee might have seen as PoC during project bidding phase leading to the dissatisfaction of end-users.

Pilot system is an approach where organizations follow the same process described above to finalize on solution and vendor, but do not roll-out solution enterprise-wide at once and rather pick fewer departments and fewer processes as the initial implementation scope and later on-board other departments and processes in a phased manner. This process is less risky, easier to manage and guarantees better success ratio compare to large-scale implementation.

6. Integration with 3rd party applications, Go or No Go?: Most of the software applications today are built on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) providing a simplest and easiest way to integrate with other applications in your IT environment. While having the feature doesn't essentially mean you must use it, it provides you with an option to explore. Integration is always helpful and productive if achieved in the right manner. Most applications today provide information output in xls or pdf format, which can be stored in an ECM system for archival purpose to meet regulatory compliance or for further sharing within the team. Most ECM systems can also provide seamless integration with your line of business applications like ERP or other BPM solutions to ensure single repository for all your contents and save on costs. Consult with your solution architect and understand the pro and cons before deciding on the integration.

7. Ensure adequate post-implementation support: When the curtains come down and toasts are raised to celebrate successful implementation of your project, only a few will have doubt that the cherish moment is soon going to turn into a nightmare. In my experience the go-live stage isn't really a 'successful completion' stage for any project. The go-live date is more of a dream come true and the hard reality hits the ground when the system gets into daily business. So it's important that you engage your vendor to provide continuous technical support to make desired changes/bug-fixes atleast for next 6-12 months to make system stable.

8. Timely upgrade is a must: The only thing which is constant in this world is 'Change'. Your business changes with the time, so as the user's expectations from your IT systems. Most ECM vendors offer newer versions of their solutions free of charge as long as you are paying the annual maintenance for product. Each release includes some bug fixes and new enhancements. Hence its a must to keep updating your ECM system to realize the benefits of new enhancements and keep the system bug-free. So plan your budget properly to keep your ECM system in track with changing times and user's expectations.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2012: What to expect?

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:25:00 +0000

Gartner released 2012 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) sometime back and the next in line will be MQ for ECM. While the WCM player's positioning remains pretty much the same compare to 2011 report, it was quite surprising to see a sudden drop in the rating of Autonomy after being acquired by HP. Gartner has dropped its rating both in terms of ability to execute and in vision, primarily due to the uncertainty over HP's commitments and business plan for Autonomy.

Though there was no surprise to miss the name of one of the ECM leader, EMC from the WCM Magic Quadrant. The curiosity however grew over EMC's strategy for adding this missing piece in their ECM offerings. Now I'll be eagerly waiting to see the 2012 Magic Quadrant for ECM which is expected to be delivered by Gartner in Q4, hopefully in October itself and see how will the EMC's absence from WCM arena affect their position in ECM MQ.

A quick comparison of various players in Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2009, 2010 and 2011 shows the following trends:

	Ability to execute	Visionaries
2009	IBM led the race in this area, followed by Microsoft, Oracle and EMC. EMC was at No. 4 and OpenText at No. 5	Microsoft was the visionary leader, which reflected in its ability to execute in 2010 report. Followers were Oracle, EMC IBM and OpenText.
2010	Microsoft pushed IBM down claiming the top spot followed by Oracle. EMC lost 4^th spot to OpenText and got pushed to below OpenText.	Oracle led the race leaving behind Microsoft, IBM, OpenText and EMC. EMC was not only lacking in ability to execute, but also in vision behind OpenText.
2011	IBM gained top spot back and the positioning was similar to 2009, except that EMC was performing below OpenText now.	Oracle led the race leaving behind Microsoft, IBM, EMC and OpenText. EMC was seen to be giving positive signals in terms of their ECM vision.
2012 (My predictions)	IBM should still make it to top with its clear product strategy and overall viability. The positioning is not expected to change since 2011.	Microsoft should gain the top spot due to the recently announced SharePoint 2013, followed by Oracle, IBM, EMC and OpenText.

So what do you think is wrong with the once market leader Documentum? Where has EMC gone wrong in its overall ECM strategy? Or is it just that the sluggish license sales is pulling them towards 'fancy' solutions like D2? which might help them acquire more new customers with the sales pitch of 'new user', since Webtop was perceived as a very complex user interface with the arrival of SharePoint.

In ECM MQ 2011, Gartner had highlighted the (1) Lack of synergies with its hardware and services team (2) Lack of SI and ISV ecosystem (3) Confusion over its product strategy in Social collaboration and WCM space as the key caution points for EMC.

In 2012, the challenges seems to have not gone away. EMC still doesn't have a Social Collaboration and WCM solution and future for eRoom or CenterStage remains uncertain. With the arrival of D2, it's certain that EMC will not invest into Webtop and TaskSpace anymore, which might scare the customers who have been using either of these applications since long and have built critical business applications using either WebTop or Taskspace. While EMC has been proposing D2 for content applications, xCP is being promoted for the case management/business process applications. There doesn't seem to be an automated migration path to convert Webtop/Taskspace based applications to D2/xCP 2.0 and customers might have to spend hefty sum to redevelop the same on newer platforms, which will be a painful exercise and might drive customers towards alternate solutions.

Though EMC has made lots of noise about "ECM in cloud" partly relying on their cloud storage business, but the successful roll-out of the service is yet to take shape, wherein Microsoft has already left their rival behind with the successful operation of Office365 in cloud (including SharePoint).

OpenText on the other hand seems to be enjoying relationship with SAP with few small wins in recent past primarily in the area of SAP content archival (that's the only product OpenText sales team seems to be selling), but still lacks larger customer acquisitions, which isn't a sustainable business strategy, unless they have already got into the comfort zone of eventually being acquired by SAP in due course of time. While the OpenText corporate seems to be on an acquisition spree with recent acquisition of EasyLink, the sales seems to be enjoying honeymoon with SAP.

Oracle made a daring announcement in Oct 2011 to swap Documentum platform licences for free. It reflected Oracle's desperation to get a few customers on their side quickly and set a precedent of acquiring rival's customers. The offer was shot down by analysts soon after the announcement, who proved that the clever math of Oracle was nothing but a marketing gimmick and customer didn't really have anything in the offer to be excited about. I haven't also heard if any customer picked-up the Oracle's offer till date. The outlook for Oracle hasn't changed much since then and they still seems to be spending lots of time in just renaming the product again and again (from Stellent to UCM to Webcenter now). Though I have heard few sizeable customer acquisitions by Oracle in recent past, but they have a long way to go in positioning their solution right against the well-established players like IBM, EMC and Microsoft.

IBM has its usual problem, a behemoth which has many dishes in its kitchen and is really confusing customers with the choices it can offer on ECM. It has IBM Content Manager, the Lotus suite and the FileNet ECM, so the sales folks seems to be often giving more than the required choices to customers or competing within. While analysts have rated FileNet BPM better than the rival's case management platforms, its facing competition within, by the Lombardi or Websphere BPM sales folks. Moreover in my experience, IBM is not known for doing justice with software acquisitions and we have a disappointing history of Lotus and Rational acquisitions, which have been fast losing market attention, though being the market leaders in their segment at the time of acquisitions.

Solving the puzzle: DMS, RMS or ECM

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 05:18:00 +0000

With the growing notion of Green IT and the need to achieve paperless office drives companies to look for an IT system which can help them reduce the paper usage in office, while increasing users productivity by the way of converting and managing papers in electronic form.

The job to identify and implement such a system often gets assigned to the IT department, which then reaches out to various IT vendors to evaluate their solutions. Each vendor today refers their solutions using different terminologies confusing the IT managers or the business decision makers and throws a unique challenge in front of them to first decide on what exactly are they looking for, a DMS, RMS or a full-blown ECM?

While the first might be dirt cheap, the later might require deep pockets to acquire, implement and maintain.While not one size fits all, its important to first zero down on the type of solution an organization is looking for and then invite the right vendors to demonstrate their product features, implementation capabilities and future support
(I'll talk about the methodology to evaluate vendors in my next article).

Here is the list of few common abbreviation used commonly in IT industry to achieve electronic storage and management of papers, which might be helpful for organizations to pick the right title for the solution they require:

Few common abbreviations

DMS: Document Management System
EDMS: Electronic Document Management System
RMS: Records Management System
CMS: Content Management System
ECM: Enterprise Content Management
WDMS: Workflow and Document Management System
CDMS: Compliance and document management system
DCS: Document Control System

Though some of the abbreviations listed above might sound very similar and refer to similar characteristics, it's important to understand the narrow difference between them and identify the right solution for your business needs.

I'll try to briefly explain the basic characteristics of these terminologies and the narrow difference between them:

DMS: A DMS is often referred to a system which manages electronic documents like office documents, pdf and images, having basic library functions like add/edit/delete document, check-in/check-out, versioning, audit trails etc.
Examples: Microsoft SharePoint, Newgen Omnidocs

EDMS: An EDMS is not very different from DMS, though it specifically narrows down the defination by adding the 'electronic' word into it. This terms is more practically used while referring to the need of a basic document management system.
Examples: Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, OpenText

RMS: Records Management System is expected to be the enhanced version of DMS, which also offers records management features, wherein users can declare certain documents as 'formal records' of the organization, archive them for a period on it for meeting the regulatory and compliance requirements.
Examples: HP TRIM

CMS: Though the CMS terminology is supposed to be used for a system which manages any type content, including office documents, emails and fax etc, but more practically this terms is being used for small web content management systems which are used to develop content rich web portals.
Examples: Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

ECM: Enterprise Content Management suite is expected to provide end-to-end content management capabilities including content capture, managing the content of any type including office documents, drawings, emails, fax, application contents, Workflow/BPM, records management, archival and compliance.

Gartner considers the following as the core components of ECM suite:

Document Management
Web Content Management
Records Management
Image Processing Applications
Social Content
Workflow/BPM

Examples: EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText

WDMS: Workflow and document management system is coined to best emphasize on two key requirements of system - Workflow and Document Management. Though you might plug-in records management and WCM features later on, but the basic objective of system is very much defined in one word -WDMS.
Examples: Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText, IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum

WCM: Web Content Management refers to the content management system using which organizations can build and manage large complex website having authoring and publishing controls.
Examples: Sitecore, Fatwire, SDL, Autonomy, Oracle Webcenter

CDMS: The C stands for compliance feature added to the document management capabilities, which refers to the need of complying with govt. regulations. Such a system is very much useful and in demand in pharmaceutical and healthcare companies due to strict regulatory requirements to comply with industry standards like HIPPA during drug trials.
Examples: FirstDoc from CSC (Built on EMC Documentum)

DCS: Document Control system, a more generic term used primarily in engineering companies, which refers to the requirement of publishing the documents to users in controlled fashion after a thorough review and approval by respective users.
Examples: Mclaren Engineering Document Management, Bentley Systems

Facebook as Enterprise Collaboration Platform: Let's brainstorm

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:37:00 +0000

I received surprisingly pleasant feedback on my last post Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?, so I thought of taking a step further and tried drilling down if my 'weird thought' can take realistic shape and if Facebook has the right ingredients to evolve as an enterprise collaboration / social media platform.

When its comes to enterprise collaboration / social media platform, enterprises usually expect the system to provide following functionalities, which add value to their business. Wikipedia and AIIM define this in following broad terms:

Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
Links: grouping similar users or content together
Authoring: including blogs and wikis
Tags: Allowing users to tag content
Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds

I thought of adding few more points to the above to make it more descriptive:

An enterprise scale system which can accommodate large amount of data including text, images, documents, videos etc.
Networking among team members and strengthening cross-functional team collaboration.
Ability to provide discussion boards with commenting and subscription features.
Publish news, announcements and events information
Real-time IM
Voice and Video conferencing facility

So does Facebook fits into our expectations?
The short answer is Yes. Facebook provides you all including ability to publish news/info for people in your community, search info/people, create groups, events, hold conversations, IM, Video conferencing and even the ability to deploy apps. Though we might debate on the authoring features like Blog and wikis, but don't we agree that the simplicity of posting information on Facebook and the powerful search lets users search for the desired content on a click? So consider a Facebook post as a blog post and the ability to search information across the system works more than a wiki. And all this comes at no-resistance from layman users, because they have already mastered the art of collaboration through Facebook way.

Can we really compare the apples?
Now let's take a step back and see if the most popular collaboration solution from Microsoft, SharePoint meet the above criteria. While SharePoint provides various capabilities listed above, it still lacks the built-in real-time voice/video collaboration and customers need to have additional software including exchange and Lync to get you all what you need. So two questions emerge:

Is it the time for the industry analysts to include the IM and Video Conferencing to include a must-have feature in Collaboration/Social Media solutions?
Does the Facebook really scores above SharePoint?

Would be interesting to know your thoughts......

TBZ6CWX89JVT

Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?

noreply@blogger.com (Hemant Prasad) — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 10:39:00 +0000

I was in a meeting with my existing ECM customer last week and during the course of our discussion we picked on a very interesting subject, Social Media in an enterprise. The CEO of this multi-billion dollar company had assigned the task to his IT manager to study the possibility and adaptability of implementing social media solution in the company.

For a moment i thought the CEO wants to increase social media presence of the company, since though he runs a large company, but that enterprise is not very known to people outside the industry domain and naturally a CEO would be interested to increase the brand value of the company by putting-up a brand building campaign on social media networks which might help him to increase the share value of company (that's the only thing every CEO is concerned about all the time :)). But I was wrong, the CEO wanted to bring a social collaboration culture within the organization, which doesn't just rely on information exchanged through email or posted on the intranet portal.

So what does the modern day CEO wants?
Well, he wants a true social collaboration culture within the organization just like we use Facebook to keep in touch with our friends. He knows that today a working professional spends maximum time of his life at work, with the colleagues in office and we need to socialize at work. So can the organizations allow professionals to socialize the same way, they socialize in their personal life? Or it has the risk of decreased productivity?
There is enough push from collaboration solution vendors for the use of social media in an enterprise and there is enough resistance/opposition from within the organization. Microsoft has been increasingly making noise about the social media features in the upcoming SharePoint 2013 and I just happen to attend a webinar from HP on Autonomy social collaboration features. So what does an organization really wants? Do they just want people to be more proactive in sharing information with each-other and communicate more effectively, so there is a 'social' angle to it as well.

If it just about the communication platform, I am not sure how is it going to be difference from various intranet portal which organizations have developed over the years which also provide features of blogging and an internal Wiki. But if its about the 'Social' angle, then I am wondering as where does SharePoint or Autonomy provides a 'social' platform, just like the one provided by the super-successful Facebook.

That's where my weird thought takes place. Why don't we think or Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg think that Facebook can be a great social media platform even for enterprise. In short, any organization's expectations from an internal social media platform would be the same, wherein the staff can post the information and people interested in that information can 'like' it to build their own cluster. People can create discussion threads and they can be archived as a corporate records. Organizations can build and deploy various apps for the users to support various business processes, and the list be long.

One of the greatest challenge faced by organizations today is poor response from end-user for the new technology deployment. This is the universal truth that the human-being is naturally resistant to change and managing change can be really painful exercise. But do we think that people will resist in using Facebook at work? Well, if the answer is NO, then there can be a big YES from many organizations in the world, who would like to contact Mark for building a "enterprise version" of Facebook :)