Notes on Forrestor Research IW vs ECM

Notes on Forrester Research:

For Enterprise Collaboration, Focus On Information Workplace Platforms, Not ECM Specialists

by Erica Driver

for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

June 26, 2007

This article distinguishes between Information Workplace (IW) Platforms and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems. It covers the similarities and differences and when and where each should be implemented. This article goes into detail about the offerings of the major vendors in the space.

While Both IW platforms and ECM Systems offer collaboration and productivity services ECM is trending towards more industry specificity allowing IW to offer more general, core services. These core services include messaging, team collaboration such as on documents and social computing tools like blogs, wikis, and tagging. It has not yet been fully determined which services should be included in IW and which should be specific to specialized collaboration applications. Examples of Specialized collaboration applications include drug approval process facilitators and collaborative software development tools.

Of particular interest for our team are the comments about Microsoft including:

“• Microsoft is a leading collaboration platform vendor.
• Microsoft offers the core collaboration platform pieces: messaging, team collaboration, real-time collaboration and communication, and some basic Social Computing tools.“

The major recommendation of the paper is to implement IW and look for ECM providers for process specific collaboration needs that provide integration points and synergies with IW.

Forrester SharePoint Research Notes

Notes on Microsoft’s 2007 Enterprise Content Management Platform
By Kyle Mcnabb

MOSS provides a single environment for collaborative document management, Web content management, records management, workflow, and eForms support

MOSS now supports defining content based on its type — such as contract, deal, article, or customer presentation which facilitates more discrete management

Document Management supports Check and Check out (standard and enterprise?)

MOSS now includes serial and parallel document review and approval workflow support.

Administrators can create new workflows using Office SharePoint Designer 2007, and developers can use Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows Workflow Foundation to create new workflows.

MOSS integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 client applications such as Outlook and Word. Document libraries can be natively accessed through the Outlook client. Employees can subscribe to document libraries, and they can get notified of changes to documents via RSS feeds and email alerts through Outlook. Furthermore, SharePoint documents and folders connected to Outlook can be synchronized with local desktops for offline access and editing

Per user price points for basic document management have hovered between $50 and $100 for the past 18 months. Moss offers basic document management abilities plus a host of additional features at that cost.

Troubles with MOSS stated in this document are not of much concern for us:

• No federated policy management support across SharePoint libraries.
• Not an issue now, nor a requested feature
• MS forces customers to migrate, not simply upgrade, existing implementations.
• MOSS 2007 implementation should work for us for years to come
• No digital asset management support(such as video).
• Teams dealing with this have their own systems in place
• Some value-added capabilities are only available with full Office upgrade.
• We intend to upgrade
• Very little support for transactional content processes. Lack robust Business Process Management (BPM) support
• Could be enhanced with supporting products