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This is the second part of a three part blog post on getting started with SharePoint 2010 for ECM and RM.  Part one dealt with understanding the problem from a Microsoft infrastructure and planning perspective.  This post covers the SharePoint partner ecosystem for ECM and RM.  The third part will discuss how to plan, design and implement SharePoint 2010 for ECM and RM using both Microsoft products and products from the SharePoint partner ecosystem.  It will define what I believe are the most important issues for enterprise SharePoint 2010 deployments for ECM and RM and how should they be addressed? 

As I pointed out in the first part, SharePoint 2010 is likely to unify much of the infrastructure for content and records in many organizations.  It is clear that many providers will play a part in the development and implementation of SharePoint content and records management solutions.  It is less clear how SharePoint enables the enforcement of retention and records management policies as they have traditionally been defined without partner extensions to the core SharePoint 2010 products. 

The definition of a SharePoint ECM partner and product ecosystem is critical because there are so many SharePoint partners that make important, but overlapping contributions to the ability of SharePoint 2010 to support ECM and RM within an enterprise.  These include product companies such as KnowledgeLake, Nintex, AvePoint, Quest, and traditional ECM Suite providers such as EMC, Open Text and IBM, as well as professional services providers.  How should all of these companies and products be evaluated?

First, how has Microsoft defined the Partner Ecosystem?  The standard PowerPoint slide that appears in many Microsoft decks about SharePoint 2010 ECM and RM divides the capabilities of SharePoint 2010 for ECM into Foundational ECM and Supplemental ECM. 

Foundational ECM capabilities are seen as the domain of Microsoft products.  Microsoft has invested in SharePoint 2010 to establish fully competitive capabilities in these areas, and partners should not expect extensive support from Microsoft.  These categories include:

• Document Management
• Records Management
• Web Content Management
• Rich Media Management
• Document Output Management
• Email Archiving
• Human Centric Workflow

Document Management – These are the basic document management services that support the filing, retrieval and management of electronic documents.  Traditional competitors include IBM (FileNet), EMC (Documentum), Open Text, and smaller providers.

Records Management – Microsoft has made great advances in the ability of SharePoint 2010 to satisfy the retention and records management needs of its customers.  Traditional RM competitors include IBM (FileNet), EMC (Documentum), and Open Text.

Web Content Management – Microsoft is using SharePoint to compete for the websites, intranet sites and portals that have traditionally been supported by the likes of Vignette, Interwoven, Plumtree, BEA, and IBM|WebSphere. 

Rich Media Management – This is the ability to handle multimedia objects and enable them to be presented appropriately.  Traditional competitors include Documentum (Bulldog) and Open Text (Artesia). 

Document Output Management - This is the ability to create specialized batch printing to create PDF, XML or other formats based on the merging of structured data and forms.  Traditional competitors include EMC (Document Sciences) and Thunderhead. 

Email Archiving - This is the ability to store and manage large volumes of electronic mail messages, mainly for compliance purposes.  Traditional competitors include Symantec (Enterprise Vault), Iron Mountain (Mimosa), EMC (EmailXtender, Source One), IBM and Open Text. 

Human Centric Workflow -  This is the ability to support document-centric workflow, especially as an extension to the Microsoft Office and Exchange/Outlook environments.  Forrester notes that “most human-centric vendors now provide sophisticated integration and document management capabilities to support large-scale business process improvement and business process transformation initiatives.”  Traditional competitors include Open Text, EMC (Documentum), and IBM (FileNet) among the ECM Suites.  This category has overlap with the Business Process Management area where human-centric workflow products compete with products such as Pegasystems, IBM (Lombardi), TIBCO that are integrated with transaction systems. 

Supplemental ECM - These are capabilities that Microsoft has elected not to tackle in SharePoint 2010, hence the phrase “Embrace and Extend Workloads with Partners” that appears under Supplemental ECM on the Microsoft chart.  Several of them are logical candidates for the next version of SharePoint, but that is still on the Microsoft drawing boards.  These categories include:

• Physical Records Management 
• Business Process Management 
• Transactional Content Management
• Scanning and Capture
• Archiving and Library Services

SharePoint ECM Suite Partners -  Some of the partners in the SharePoint ECM and RM ecosystem are so pervasive that it makes more sense to think of them as SharePoint ECM Suite partners because they are active in so many segments of the SharePoint Supplemental ECM market.  These include:

KnowledgeLake defined the market for SharePoint ECM, starting with their capture products.  They are “The SharePoint ECM Company”, as their website points out, and this is supported through their close relationship to Microsoft.  They have extended their tightly integrated capture capabilities to include SharePoint 2010 support for viewing, search, workflow, indexing and many of the capabilities that have traditionally defined ECM and RM.  They are SharePoint 2010-pure, but are supporting a wide range of the supplemental ECM and RM capabilities either natively or through their partners (Nintex, MetaLogix)

Open Text supports all of the supplemental ECM and RM capabilities, and has been much more aggressive than any of the other ECM Suite vendors in publicizing their support for Microsoft SharePoint.  It launched cooperative marketing agreements in the mid-2000’s to go to market with Microsoft on opportunities where ECM and RM capabilities beyond those provided by MOSS 2007 were required.  Open Text has some very large reference accounts where they are well integrated with SharePoint for ECM and RM. 

EMC supports every one of the supplemental ECM and RM capabilities identified by Microsoft.  EMC has recently been much more aggressive in deepening the integration of the full range of their ECM and RM products with SharePoint.  The November 2010 Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant Report faults EMC for not better publicizing and marketing their powerful SharePoint integration capabilities. 

IBM supports all of the supplemental ECM and RM capabilities identified by Microsoft but its integrations are less tight and its commitment is less strong than either EMC or Open Text.  IBM supports SharePoint because it is a significant factor in so many IBM accounts. 

Physical Records Management -  Physical RM mainly includes paper documents and folders, both onsite and offsite.  Examples of physical records management requirements would include support for multiple file locations, bar codes, physical document workflows, and appropriate reporting.  It is important that physical and electronic documents are managed according to policy and records retention in an integrated manner. 

Certified Records Management is another partner opportunity in records management for both physical and electronic content.  Microsoft has left the development of certified RM capabilities up to their ISV partner community.  Certified RM is mainly focused on geographic jurisdictions for certification.  Several vendors have announced their intentions to provide components to enable the certification of the SharePoint 2010 repository to support the certifications in each of these jurisdictions, including DoD 5015.2 in the United States (Gimmal), MoReq 2010 in the European Union (Automated Intelligence), and VERS in Australia (RecordPoint). There will undoubtedly be other providers who pursue these certifications. 

SharePoint ecosystem Physical RM partners include:

• File Trail was the first company to deliver a physical content type that could be incorporated into the SharePoint Term Store and Content Hub service.  They have a long history as a physical and RFID RM solution.
• OmniRIM was early to the SharePoint physical records management market.  Their original solution involved a synchronization of content between SharePoint and the OmniRIM server.  They have announced a new solution that will more elegantly integrate a physical content type into the SharePoint 2010 Term Store and Content Hub service. 
• Accutrac is owned by Iron Mountain which gives them a significant footprint in the RM market.  They are currently integrating their physical RM solution to SharePoint via webparts. 
• LaserFiche is a longtime mid-market ECM and RM solution.  They have taken advantage of EBS connectors to connect the LaserFiche server to SharePoint.  Additionally, they manifest their physical RM solution as a SharePoint application using webparts. 
• HP TRIM has a very sophisticated EBS connector-based integration between SharePoint and an HP TRIM server.  Additionally, they manifest their physical RM solution as a SharePoint application using webparts. 

Business Process Management-  Forrester describes “the integration-centric BPM market” as having evolved to provide complete capabilities to support heavy integration requirements. While some of these vendors provide good human-centric workflow capabilities, most focus primarily on providing enterprise service bus, service registries, service repositories, and development environments targeting large-scale service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives.”  Forrester also notes, “While some customers might have more complicated integration requirements that require capabilities provided by comprehensive integration solutions, the Web service and integration capabilities included in today’s human-centric BPM suites are sufficient to meet the integration requirements of the majority of BPM teams.”  While all of the BPM vendors, such as with products like Pegasystems, IBM (Lombardi), TIBCO, will support integration with SharePoint, the key SharePoint 2010 BPM partners include Nintex, K2, and Global 360. 

Transactional Content Management involves the high volume, specialty imaging and ECM applications that have been implemented using the traditional ECM Suites.  They have large, distributed user populations and performance requirements that SharePoint has traditionally had difficulty scaling to meet.  Examples would include check imaging, high volume claims applications in insurance, and many SAP applications.  SharePoint 2010 enables much more sophisticated connections to these applications to be defined in the Business Data Catalog, so that SharePoint applications can connect to these applications.  Hyland, Oracle, SAP, and the ECM Suites have traditionally been the products to support Transactional Content Management. 

Scanning and Capture has been a fertile market for SharePoint ecosystem partners.  Microsoft has indicated that it is not building scanning and capture as SharePoint applications in this version of SharePoint.  KnowledgeLake defined the SharePoint capture market, and has built other products on its strength of its capture market position.  Many Microsoft field representatives default to KnowledgeLake when a customer wants ECM solutions.  Traditionally, EMC (Captiva), Kofax, IBM (FileNet), and Open Text (RightFax, Captaris) have been strong in the capture market, and have recently announced stronger support for SharePoint.  Niche solutions, including Kodak, ECopy, ABBYY, Readsoft, and Atalasoft are also gaining market share.

Archiving and Library Services are a broad set of capabilities that support SharePoint ECM and RM applications.  In particular, they leverage the Microsoft External Blob Storage (EBS) or Remote Blob Storage (RBS) application program interfaces (API’s) in a variety of ways.  I have written about this previously in AIIM Communities and Dave Martin of EMC had this post this week.  Metalogix (StoragePoint) and AvePoint support these API’s in ways that are transparent to the application.  StoragePoint also integrates SharePoint with object level attributes at the File Server level, so that this content can be stored outside of SharePoint.  LaserFiche, HP TRIM, and EMC use EBS integration to move content transparently to their servers for records management. 

There are a variety of other SharePoint infrastructure capabilities and tools that add significant value to a SharePoint implementation, but are outside the scope of this blog entry.  These include:

• Administrative Tools: (AvePoint, Idera, Quest, Neverfail)
• Email Management Tools:  (Symantec, CommVault, Mimosa, EMC|SourceOne, Proofpoint)
• Share Drive Migration Tools:  (StoredIQ, Kazeon, Active Navigation, Digital Reef, Concept Searching)
• Search Tools:  (FAST, Autonomy, Coveo, Google, MetaCarta, Recommind)
• EDiscovery Vendors: (Recommind, Exterro, Clearwell, Work Products, EnCase)

You might ask why so many tools are needed.  The answer is that SharePoint 2010 has gaps.  For portals, business intelligence applications, and collaboration team sites, these gaps might not be critical, but to implement content and records management consistently across an enterprise, the gaps become more critical.  Some of the issues that we have seen include the following:

• Lack of an Information Lifecycle for content
• Content Types either not used, or not used consistently
• Content retention and disposal policies are not applied based on business rules
• Non-standard site proliferation
• Content governance is not consistent across SharePoint
• Inconsistent application of security across SharePoint (many types of security)
• Content ownership is unclear across SharePoint (site, library, document)

In the third and final part of this blog entry, I will discuss how SharePoint can be implemented to address the issues of content and records management in very large organizations.  This will highlight several of the key opportunities we see in the SharePoint market and why SharePoint 2010 may be the biggest ECM and RM services opportunity ever.