Weather at the 2010 AIIM Expo + Conference: Partly Cloudy – Repost From AIIM ERM Expert Blog

This is a repost from my blog post on the AIIM ERM Community Expert Blog

For anyone who attended the 2010 AIIM expo + conference last week you had to wonder if this were really the “SharePoint Conference”. As I walked around the expo floor, besides the large SharePoint 2010 booth from Microsoft and large adjacent KnowledgeLake booth, almost every booth referred to SharePoint on their signs or signaled that their product or service offering supported SharePoint. Additionally, with an entire track (the SharePoint 2010 Summit) dedicated to SharePoint related topics one might wonder what the future holds for the AIIM expo + conference.

One thing surprising to me was the way Microsoft chose to configure their booth with only an “experience classroom” and partner pavilion. They did not have any Microsoft manned stations to highlight, discuss, and demonstrate how SharePoint 2010 supported ECM and records management in a much deeper way with the upcoming release. Another surprising omission was lack of promotion for Microsoft’s cloud Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). I would have though Microsoft would have really focused on BPOS as an offering to take advantage of the interest in cloud computing offerings.

The cloudiest vendor was SpringCM. This SaaS vendor was completely focused on Cloud as the answer to fast and easy deployment of ECM. Their offering sounds pretty compelling but I wonder how this offering play with large global enterprises that have a significant investment in SharePoint or some other ECM solution like Documentum or Livelink. I think SpringCM has a window of opportunity but will start bumping up against the Microsoft BPOS offering when Microsoft releases the SharePoint 2010 version of BPOS.

I did not see any other vendors who really talked about a credible cloud based offerings (delivered in a “pay-per-use and self-service way” as defined in my previous post) on the exposition floor. Alfresco points to hosting partners which provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for hosting Alfresco “in the cloud” but after a quick look at the partner sites it looks like most are really just providing off premise hosting for an Alfresco implementations as opposed to a true pay-per-use cloud offering.

I attended the keynote session entitled “Reinvent Work, Collaboration, and Innovation in the 21st Century” by Google’s Cyrus Mistry. I was somewhat disappointed since his talk really did not focus on leveraging the Cloud to transform how businesses manage information. He really focused more on how Google is using Gmail and Google Apps to create a culture of information sharing which is a very laudable goal.

What was disappointing was Cyrus’ recommendation “not to waste time” deciding which files to keep and which to delete and to just keep everything. Just because storage is getting cheaper and for Google the solution to any search problem is Google Search does not relieve organization from sound records management accountability. James Watson’s recent post on the AIIM ERM Community talks about the rationale for appropriately deleting unneeded content regularly. I think the folks at Google should read the blogs and Wikis at the AIIM ERM Community regularly.

Until next year…

Technorati Tags: AIIM,SharePoint,Records Management,Blogs,Open Text,Alfresco,KnowledgeLake

New Years 2008: Looking Back & Looking Forward

Happy New Year to my loyal readers. I’ll bet many of you were wondering if I would ever write a post again. Well here we go…

Looking Back at 2007

Last year was a year of amazing change for me personally and for the ECM industry. A year ago today I would have never guessed that I would be making a significant career change in 2007 by accepting a new position with a Global 50 energy company with global scope and broad operational responsibility. All directly related to making ECM better for my company. Also this change would impact my family by moving us to Houston and involving travel globally on a regular (1-2 weeks per month) basis. Whew!

At the beginning of 2007 the big news was the launch of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and the potential impact on the ECM marketplace. Also Web 2.0 was gaining ground and becoming part of the everyday lexicon. I even spoke about this at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco last April; Is It Possible To Successfully Manage Content In The New Wild West: ECM In A Web 2.0 World. By the end of 2007 Web 2.0 has become somewhat passe’ and everyone is now talking about Enterprise 2.0 and some companies are actually doing something about it. Taking the Web 2.0 social technologies and capabilities and making them part of enterprise content management solutions.

Last month while in London for a couple of weeks I had the opportunity to meet with founders John Newton and Ian Howells at the Alfresco world headquarters. Alfresco is making ECM in a Web 2.0 world a reality by integrating the Alfresco content management platform with leading open source Web 2.0 social computing technologies and services such as Facebook for collaboration, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, MediaWiki for wikis, TypePad and WordPress for blogging. The idea is very interesting and I think they are on to something by providing corporate users with tools that are intuitive, easy to use and in some cases, ones that they already have experience with.

One thing I think is missing is a governance model for this type of extremely flexible and user controlled content management environment. What may be needed is what I am calling a Governance 2.0 model. I think if Alfresco proposes a governance model that addresses some of the security and compliance concerns that corporate users may have with this “Web 2.0″ style ECM solution then they will really have something. I really want to thank both of them for sharing their ideas and thoughts with me last month.

Looking Forward

Looking forward toward 2008, I am excited at the possibilities the responsibilities of my new position offers. I am also responsible for the personal data privacy program for the company and will be expanding my horizons and knowledge in that direction. The biggest change I see looking forward is that I now have a chance to actually prove that I can make ECM better for a large multinational corporation. It has to be workable and I cannot do this for the organization or “to” the organization. My job will be to take the tools (both technical and procedural) and help the organization grow the capability to better manage information through people, process, and technology capabilities that my team helps to grow organically over time.

This is a huge challenge but I am eager to make a difference and continue to share what we learn. What works and what does not work. I am also committed to helping lead the effort to create a new professional discipline for information management professionals. I wrote about this before but my thinking and approach has evolved over the last four months. In my next post I will share my new manifesto that makes the case for this new professional discipline.

I am not one for New Years resolutions but I am committing to the goal of trying to write at least one post per week here at BetterECM. Now that I have drank from the fire hose over the last four months and have pieced together a plan going forward I think that this goal is achievable.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions and will continue to share what I learn and continue to learn from other’s outstanding blogs also. Thanks and Happy New Year!

Technorati Tags: ECM, Alfresco, open source, Microsoft, MOSS

BetterECM Upcoming Events

The next couple of weeks are pretty busy. Tomorrow I am participating on a panel discussion called: “Point/Counterpoint: Microsoft vs. Open Source” at the Greater Baltimore Tech Council. The event will be held at the Holiday Inn Select, 2004 Greenspring Drive. Timonium, MD.

After that, I am co-presenting with Connie Moore, VP & Research Director at Forrester for an “invitation only” Executive Roundtable event at the Baltimore Ruth’s Chris Steak House. The event is entitled: “BPM: Realizing Your Microsoft Investments Through Process Automation”.

Finally, come join me for breakfast, next Thursday morning, May 10, 2007 for the National Capital Chapter – AIIM monthly event. My presentation, “What Does the Future Hold for ECM?” will look at the future of ECM by reviewing some of the clues I observed at the 2007 AIIMexpo in Boston last month. I hope to see a great turnout and look forward to a spirited discussion about the future of ECM. The event will be held at the Key Bridge Marriott, 1401 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA, Phone: (703) 524-6400.

Technorati tags: AIIM, Microsoft, MOSS2007, BPM, ECM, Open+Source, Forrester

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

Alfresco Launches Enterprise Class Open Source Web Content Management

Alfresco announce the availability of the Alfresco Web Content Management Preview release. Hat tip to MarketWire. Here is the PRESS RELEASE Alfresco Launches Enterprise Class Open Source Web Content Management.

Some highlights:

The Alfresco Web Content Management Preview release is an advanced WCM platform that includes features such as:

• Virtualization Server
• Multi-Site Transactional Publishing
• Web Content Compliance Server
• 100% Standards Based
• High-Availability
• Highly Scalable Platform   

End user features include:

• Standards-Based Forms to Create Pages – Chiba XForms
• Simple Multi-Channel XML Publishing
• Email-Based Production Workflow
• In-Context Review
• Integrated Support for Content Managers, Contributors, Reviewers, Web Designers and Application Developers in one repository
• Parallel Branching and Merging
• Dependency Management
• Pre-Built Templates and Website Components

The Alfresco folks have been really busy over the last few months. The fact that they are releasing this many products, this fast, is very impressive. I will try to carve out some time over the next two weeks to take a look at both the WCM and 1.4 preview releases.

I think Alfresco will become viewed as a credible alternative to the traditional ECM solutions like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and the few remaining players.

Tags: alfresco ECM ibm microsoft, WCM web+content+management