Future of ECM Presentation to The First Annual AIIM Western - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Click to edit Master title style Microsoft SharePoint and the Future of ECM

Presentation to

The First Annual AIIM Western Regional Conference

November 2, 2007

Content + Context = CollaborationTM

Agenda

1. Introduction (5 minutes)

2. History of ECM, History of SharePoint and Microsoft‟s Approach to ECM (15 minutes) 3. The Impact of SharePoint on the ECM Market (15 minutes)

4. Conclusions and Considerations (15 minutes) 5. Questions and Wrap Up (10 minutes)

About C3 Associates

• Calgary-based professional services firm focused

exclusively on ECM

• Vendor independent
• Mission: Help organizations maximize their

investments in ECM

• Focus: Align ECM projects with organizational
• bjectives
• Means: Connect top-notch ECM professionals with

clients ready to succeed with ECM

The Bottom Line

• 1. SharePoint is a big deal
• 2. SharePoint really is an ECM

application

• 3. There is room for everyone:

Traditional ECM applications will survive and thrive

The Case for ECM

ECM – The Story So Far

The Business Problem:

• The rise of the knowledge worker shifted the burden

for document creation to the end user

• Enabled by the desktop PC, this led to the explosive

growth of unstructured content

• Most organizations manage this unstructured content

poorly

• Leads to challenges in finding and re-using important

information, creates significant compliance risks

ECM – The Story So Far

The Records Management Problem:

• 1. Keeping what we need to keep
• 2. Not keeping what we don‟t need to keep
• 3. Knowing when we‟ve successfully achieved the first

two steps!

• This is even more challenging in the age of

electronic information and ad hoc collaboration

• “Email is the worst form of collaboration ever

invented except for all the others.”

ECM – The Story So Far

Deployment approaches vary:

• Departmental / point solutions
• Enterprise-wide rollout
• Often multiple tools

But the results are often the same:

• What works for one department doesn‟t work for

another

• Users find it difficult to use, often work around the

system

ECM – The Story So Far

• Strong business case, maturing software tools

should mean the “content chaos” problem is solved and the paperless office is here, right?

• The problem: Usability

“This is a great tool so long as you don’t want to put documents in and you don’t need to get documents out.”

• An unnamed ECM user

A Brief History of Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint

• Collaborative web-based tool for sharing documents

and information across teams

• Microsoft positioning: ad hoc informal collaboration,

project-based and / or with a limited lifetime

• End user focus

“…users in your organization can easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the

• rganization.”
• www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Microsoft SharePoint

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)

• “Team Sites”
• Document library, contact lists, calendar,

announcements, discussion forums

• Check-in, check-out, simple version control, email

alerts

• Full-text search within a site, sort-based metadata

search

• Free with Windows Server 2003

SharePoint as an ECM Tool

• The good news: There‟s a lot of demand for

SharePoint

• The bad news: There‟s a lot of demand for

SharePoint

• “Grassroots” nature (and the fact that it‟s free) leads

to rogue installs

• Users have a clear need to manage content but

rejected “traditional” ECM tools

• The challenge for information management

professionals: Channel the demand for content management into a manageable structure

SharePoint as an ECM Tool

The Enterprise Content Management Continuum

Shared Drives & Email “Single Source

• f the Truth”

WSS 2003 Full-Feature ECM

The Evolution of SharePoint

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

released in January 2007

• Major functional improvements:
• Scalability: MOSS 2007 behaves more like what we

expect an ECM system to behave like (e.g. Document Centre model)

• Document level security
• Major & minor versions
• In-line metadata entry integrated with Office 2007

„ribbon‟ interface

• Embedded RM capabilities (DoD compliant)

The Evolution of SharePoint

• Major functional improvements (con‟t):
• Audit trails available in Office 2007
• OOTB workflows (e.g. document approval, records

declaration)

• Integrated web content management
• Extensible enterprise search tools
• „Roll-up‟ multiple document libraries into a single view
• Native blogs and wikis
• RSS feeds for list items and documents

The Evolution of SharePoint

The Enterprise Content Management Continuum

Shared Drives & Email “Single Source

• f the Truth”

WSS 2003 MOSS 2007 Full-Feature ECM

Building SharePoint into ECM

• Microsoft‟s target: mid-market, mass market
• MOSS 2007 forces us to think differently about how

we address user demands for content management

• SharePoint is more “Web 2.0” than centrally-

managed ECM applications; intended for end users to create, configure and manage all on their own

• This sounds scary…but maybe it‟s an opportunity?

The Microsoft Approach

Goal #1 – Maximize Employee Productivity

• Trying to leverage „ownership‟ of the desktop by

enabling collaboration

• Feel that this is best done by allowing users to

collaborate on their own terms: decentralized and unstructured

• “Most of the content created in a collaborative space

are NOT records” (Microsoft RM Team Blog, April 27, 2006)

• However, they do recognize the need to manage the

portion of collaborative content that are records

The Microsoft Approach

Goal #2 – Manage Records

• “Records Spaces” – for final, official copies of

information; managed by records managers

• Records are immutable, spaces designed for long

term storage and read-only access

• Basic Functionality:
• Create, apply and maintain a file plan, metadata

scheme and retention schedules

• Deal with hold orders
• Generate audit trails and reports
• A way to accept records declared in collaborative

spaces

The ECM Market

The ECM Market

• SharePoint accounted for $800 million in revenue for

Microsoft in FY2007

• Coexistence strategy: Most other ECM vendors

providing SharePoint integrations

• Microsoft dominates the desktop and collaboration
• Traditional ECM vendors focused on vertical

markets, compliance, records management

• Large SharePoint deployments starting (Miami Dade

County School District – 400,000 users)

The ECM Market

• The BIG QUESTION: Can SharePoint provide the

same functionality as existing ECM systems?

• Over time, yes, it probably can (but in some areas is

not ready for „prime time‟)

• Critical to understand business drivers for ECM

before making technology decisions

• Important to recognize that best practice in

SharePoint implementation is still developing

Conclusions and Considerations

Conclusions

• 1. SharePoint is not a silver bullet
• It will not solve all problems with regard to

collaboration, enterprise content management, search, business intelligence, etc.

• Enables information workers, but business

processes and change management strategies must be established before a deployment

• This is true of any ECM application, not just

SharePoint

Conclusions

• 2. SharePoint is a development platform
• Incredible flexibility
• Simple out of the box functionality not likely to meet

more than the most straightforward use cases

• Enterprise deployment requires developer expertise

to deploy, configure and support

• This is also true of other ECM systems (although

probably less so)

Conclusions

• 3. SharePoint deployments can be deceptively easy
• Basic collaboration requirements are well met by

SharePoint

• Relatively easy to get up and running
• Temptation to deploy without planning – This will

doom your deployment to failure

• SharePoint is constantly maturing: Microsoft

development, blogs and third-party development

Conclusions

• 4. There‟s room in the ECM market for everyone
• SharePoint is several years away from meeting

robust records management requirements

• Vertical applications in SharePoint still very

immature (e.g. drawing management, SOX compliance)

• There‟s a reason analysts are raising forecasts for

traditional ECM vendors like Open Text

Implications for…

Existing ECM Customers

• Important to determine business case for MOSS:

What problem are you trying to solve?

• If focus is compliance, RM, vertical application

integration (especially drawing management), most likely to have success with traditional ECM

• If focus is collaboration and shared drive

replacement, more likely to have success with MOSS

• Most common scenario will be a hybrid approach
• Think about existing integrations (both home-

grown and vendor-supplied)

Implications for…

New ECM Customers

• Think about your existing infrastructure (Wintel /

SQL or not?)

• Think about your Office 2007 upgrade timeline
• Think about your organizational readiness for

ECM: Do you have a clear business case?

• Be flexible with any major SharePoint

implementation

• Be prepared to substantially revise your approach

if you stumble on your first try

Implications for…

ECM Practitioners

• Microsoft thinks differently about ECM than

traditional ECM vendors

• This approach creates unique challenges and
• pportunities
• Recognize the need for SharePoint experts

(developers) to configure and customize the tool to meet your unique needs

• Records managers, IT team, legal / compliance

team and business stakeholders must come together to make the most of SharePoint

Implications for…

ECM Practitioners (con‟t)

• SharePoint is a collaboration tool that also has

records management capabilities

• User focus creates opportunities to identify and

manage records, but also leaves gaps

• Although SharePoint is end user focused,

planning, change management and training are still critical

• MOSS is having a significant impact in the ECM

market and cannot be ignored

Resources

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/default.aspx Military Grade Compliance for SharePoint (DoD Compliance White Paper) http://www.appliedis.com/Library/Military%20Grade%20Compliance%20for%20SharePoint%20vfwe b.pdf Online Guide – Planning Records Management in MOSS 2007 http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/271017e8-7f23-4166-9501- 140ad2fc555d1033.mspx?mfr=true Help and How-To For SharePoint http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101211721033.aspx

Click to edit Master title style Thank You!

Greg Clark 403.863.5998 greg.clark@c3associates.com Blog: http://www.c3associates.com/blog

Content + Context = CollaborationTM