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.