Happy New Year From BetterECM

As the new year approaches I wanted to thank all the loyal readers of BetterECM. 2006 has been an interesting birth year for this BetterECM.

BetterECM was born on April 16, 2006 and the number of readers has grown up rather quickly. I made over a 100 posts and you have made over 100 comments. The other very interesting statistic is the number of spam comments are now over 2,200! Who knew that we could measure Blog success by the number of spam comments.

Starting and writing BetterECM has been very interesting and rewarding. I discovered many other useful Blogs as a result and had the benefit of some interesting perspectives presented by YOU!

I think 2007 will be a year of more big changes. Big changes for the ECM market and for me. I plan to challenge the traditional definitions of ECM and present some alternative ways of viewing ECM. I am working on that new post now and hope to get it out this first week of the new year. I encourage you to comment any suggested new topics, challenge my ideas and otherwise join in the conversation about ECM and how to make it better.

I wish everyone a happy, prosperous, and Better New Year!

AIIM: The ECM Association Releases Electronic Management Survey

Hat tip to John Mancini. He sent me the link to the recent study; Electronic Records Management: For Most, It’s Still “Waiting for Godot” this evening. Normally the full survey is only made available to AIIM Professional Members but John is making the complete study available to everyone. You can download the survey from his post here.

Some of the key findings from the study include:

• Managing Electronic Information Still #2 Priority in Most Organizations (vs. Paper)
• Many Records Management Programs Just Cover the Tip of the Iceberg
• Organizations—Especially Medium Sized Ones—Are Vulnerable to New e-Discovery Rules
• In Searching for an Electronic Records Solution, Organizations Stress the Basics
• RM Outsource Opportunities Exist, Especially as RM Requirements Grow More Complex

Thanks John!

Technorati tags: AIIM, RM, survey, ECM

Alfresco: Evolving ECM At Warp Speed

Alfresco made another big announcement this week but it was mostly unnoticed by the typical technology focused blogs and traditional media. The announced their First Embedded Enterprise Content Management System.

From the press release:

This offers application vendors a low-cost, scalable platform, which is standards based, to OEM as part of their application. Traditionally application vendors have had to manage the high cost, of either developing their own repository, or using an expensive, proprietary offering from an ECM vendor.

What is significant about this announcement and the others that Alfresco has been regularly making over the last year is that they are significantly increasing the velocity of developing improvements and enhancements to the Alfresco ECM platform. Most traditional ECM vendors take months and up to  year or more for delivering a new release or version. Since the beginning of 2006 they have released three four versions of Alfresco ECM along with other major enhancements like web content management, DoD 5015.2 records management, and now embedded ECM.

What do you think? Is Alfresco going to force the big guys to become more nimble? Or is it just impossible for them to move any faster?

Update: After reading John Newton’s post Looking Forward to Alfresco in 2007, I noted that Alfresco had four releases in 2006!

Technorati tags: Alfresco, Open Source, ECM

Christmas Came Early: BetterECM Joins The 9rules Network!

I just got home and sat down to catch up on the over 200 feeds I watch…What a surprise to check my 9rules feed and see that BetterECM was selected to be added to the 9rules Network. I have been watching the daily lists of new addees and wondering if BetterECM would make it since my Blog is relatively young. From the 9rules About page:

 9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics.

What’s really cool is that I get to join a group of Blogs that I read everyday and respect highly like Guy Kawasaki’s and Lorelle on WordPress.

Anyway, it’s official, BetterECM joins the 9rules Network. Oh yeah. I already said that.

BPM & Steak: A Great Combo Part 3 – Top Five New BPM Features of MOSS 2007

Sorry this took so long to get out. Been traveling a bit.

At the end of our Executive Roundtable that I did with Connie Moore from Forrester, I shared with the attendees my top five new BPM features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. I thought some of my reader may find this list useful. So here we go…

Number 5: Leverages ASP.Net 2.0 – Developers can leverage ASP.Net 2.0 features in SharePoint based applications. ASP.net 2.0 brings a number of enhancements including Master Pages that allows for visual inheritance, Web Parts that enable end-user customizable controls, Provider Model that allows for integrating custom data stores (as opposed to using AD), New data controls (GridView, FormView, DetailsView), New localization technique, and Personalization services.  

Number 4: Web based InfoPath capability with InfoPath Forms Server. Office Forms Server 2007 enables InfoPath2007 form templates designed in InfoPath to be published as ASP.NET Web applications that provide a similar experience to using the InfoPath 2007 client. Now forms based business applications can be shared with customers, partners, or suppliers using only a web browser. Another big benefit is that application user interface (UI) forms can quickly be designed using InfoPath 2007 and then rendered and embedded within the SharePoint application.

Number 3: Integrated workflow built on Windows Workflow Foundation. MOSS 2007 includes user-configurable workflow templates that can guide review and approval processes. Developers and IT administrators can also use Microsoft Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer 2007 to define custom workflows. MOSS 2007 supplies the following workflows:

• Approval
• Collect Feedback
• Collect Signatures
• Disposition Approval
• Issue Tracking
• Translation Management (for publishing with multiple languages)

Office 2007 has also made integrating workflow directly into the Office desktop clients easy for software developers and partners. Now the assigned task, actions, and any data needed to complete a work step can be displayed directly in the Office UI either as a custom ribbon tab or above the document as a task pane.

Number 2: Built-in business intelligence capabilities with Excel Services. Excel Services can be used to display business data as a Web Part where all viewers can see it in a centralized location where the original, posted Excel document is protected from unauthorized changes. Users can still download copies of the spreadsheet to experiment but they can’t modify the original, official version of the document, which is protected as the company’s official business record. This supports the notion of “one of the truth” for a company’s financial data. With Excel Services, the spreadsheet still has the look and feel of the familiar client. Key performance indicators (KPIs), out-of-the-box (OOB) features, and custom calculations are the same as with the Office Excel desktop experience completely through a web browser.

Number 1: The Business Data Catalogue (BDC) supports a declarative approach to surfacing external business data. The Business Data Catalog is a new business integration feature in MOSS 2007. It is a shared service and it enables SharePoint to surface business data from back-end server applications without any coding. The BDC bridges the gap between the portal site and business applications. Key data from various business applications can be brought into SharePoint lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications.

The Business Data Catalog provides built-in support for displaying data from databases and Web services. You can use Business Data Catalog to display data from SAP, Siebel, or other line-of-business (LOB) application via Web services or databases. The Business Data Catalog provides access to the underlying data sources with a declarative metadata model that provides a consistent and simplified client object model. As a bonus, the data brought in by the BDC can included in the SharePoint search index. Now users can search for both unstructured data (documents) and structured data (databases and applications) using a single search and get consolidated results.

Technorati tags: BPM, MOSS+2007, Microsoft, Office 2007, ECM