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Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

By Michael Alsup posted 07-17-2010 20:05

  

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC this week.  While the market strength of SharePoint was evident, the event was focused on the full range of Microsoft products.  This gave me a chance to listen to a different set of perspectives than I get from the ECM and RM communities.  This is my report:

  1. The Capture community for SharePoint 2010 is expanding quickly.  Kofax and Psigen and EMC were showing or talking about their SharePoint 2010 capture tools.  Kofax is a longtime player in enterprise capture and Psigen has been a longtime player in the service bureau market.  Both seemed to be following the money to SharePoint.  Kofax, in particular, has recently hired a number of well-known ECM veterans, including Martyn Christian, formerly of IBM and FileNet, and Dan Lucarini, formerly of Alchemy, Captaris, and Open Text.  They join the Kofax CEO, Reynolds Bish, who successfully built Captiva and sold it to EMC.  Kofax is making a strong play to retain their enterprise customers as they move to SharePoint.  KnowledgeLake is the longtime leader in SharePoint Capture, and they are building a full set of capabilities to extend SharePoint ECM. 
  2. ECM capabilities to extend SharePoint.  In my conversations, it was evident that the SharePoint customer community is still primarily implementing SharePoint 2010 for ECM and RM in lab and pilot environments in Q3’2010.  They are targeting 2011 for the broader enterprise deployments of SharePoint.  Several of the SharePoint ISV partners, notably Nintex and KnowledgeLake, have done yeoman’s work in building capabilities to fill in many of the gaps of SharePoint 2010.  Nintex is focused on compliance applications in its workflow solutions.  They build tools for their partners to build solutions upon.  KnowledgeLake was showing off its new Silverlight viewer, which includes basic integrations with SharePoint 2010’s content and records management features.  KnowledgeLake was also highlighting its conversion platforms, which target the migration of the traditional ECM suites into SharePoint.  They believe that their clients are trading up when they migrate to SharePoint.  Their success is hard to argue with. 
  3. Records Management and DoD.  The fact that the event was in Washington DC put some focus on the ability of SharePoint to support the DoD 5015 requirements.  This is important to federal clients even if it isn’t in the core SharePoint 2010 capabilities.  The primary SharePoint RM exhibiting solutions that supported DoD 5015 requirements were available were from companies like HP and Open Text.  HP was showing their new SharePoint External Blob Storage integrations to SharePoint 2010 that are provided in HP Trim.  Open Text has been a leader in SharePoint-integrated ECM and RM solutions and was previewing the new capabilities of its SharePoint 2010 integrations and integration frameworks. 
  4. As you would expect at an event for Microsoft Partners, systems integrators were there in force.  The SharePoint market is a best of breed bonanza for partners to add value to SharePoint.  SharePoint does not provide the full set of ECM and RM capabilities that the ECM Suite vendors provide.  Furthermore, Microsoft makes it clear that SharePoint is a development platform with roles for both ISV partners and integrators to add value in the construction of ECM and RM solutions for their clients.  Companies like AvePoint, Colligo, Quest, and MetaLogix were showing off tools that could be used by integrators to accelerate their solutions development and migrations.  These platforms extend SharePoint 2010 in different ways and are evolving so rapidly that it is challenging to know which ones to bet on as an integrator. 
  5. SharePoint 15 is on the horizon.  Now that Office 2010 is launched, the Microsoft fiscal year is over, and its people have caught their breath, there is a new focus on the problems that need to be solved in the next generation of the products.  It is clear that the market success of Apple, Google, and Oracle are primary in the mind of Microsoft and making the user interface even easier to work is high on the target list moving toward the next generation. 


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