Blogs

I have been out in the field lately (apologies to Bryant for not posting more often) and this post is on what I have heard clients talking about lately.  Obviously, this sample isn’t a complete sample, but it has been an exciting first four months of 2012. 

SharePoint continues to roll for document-centric business applications

Companies are looking at SharePoint for document-centric business applications, not just Records Management (RM) or content governance (or portals or collaboration or all the things SharePoint does so well).  So far this year, we’ve seen many instances where companies wanted to migrate document-centric business applications to SharePoint from their legacy ECM products.  These are applications like accounts payable, contracts, HR, and purchasing.  Gartner used to call them “Content Enabled Vertical Applications” (CEVA’s). This has been especially true in SAP shops where the SAP ArchiveLink protocol makes it so easy to migrate from one ECM platform to another.  The SAPGUI controls the user experience, so the migration is unloading documents from one platform and loading the documents to another platform.  There is some important validation work to be done, but this is not nearly as hard as the traditional ECM product migrations have been.  Several of these migrations have required less than 6 months of product maintenance of the legacy ECM products to fund the software, the full conversion effort and the complete migration of the content. 

Can we get physical with SharePoint RM?

There are a lot more SharePoint RM products showing up on my radar.  Bruce Miller (of RimTech and DoD 5015.2 fame) listed five vendors in his presentation at the Houston ARMA Show last week.  These included Collabware, GimmalSoft, I5, RecordPoint, and Orangutech.  In addition, File Trail and Automated Intelligence continue to gain traction in several markets.  The result is that inside SharePoint RM is finally producing the sort of product revenue that had been predicted.  Bruce said that the number one question he gets is how customers can implement physical records management inside SharePoint.  Bruce’s site is a wealth of information in this area. 

I’ve looked at Clouds from both sides now 

I had assumed that the next generation of SharePoint would feature much more commonality between on-premise SharePoint sites and Office 365 sites in the cloud.  More recently, it is becoming clearer that SharePoint 15 will be focused on addressing the requirements of the cloud primarily.  "With Office 15, for the first time ever, Microsoft will simultaneously update cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio." says PJ Hough, the Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Office Division.  There will be a compelling opportunities for public and private clouds, and “hybrid” SharePoint.

Full records management in SharePoint 15 may require either a web service connection to a private cloud-hosted records management service or an on-premise SharePoint service (in a SharePoint site or Records Center or other repository of record).  There will still be a wide variety of significant opportunities for partners to add value to the next generation of SharePoint. 

The AIIM Conference was Great!

After a hiatus of at least a decade, it was great to see AIIM back in the conference business.  John Mancini has done a masterful job of transforming AIIM to be relevant in the SOLOMO (social-local-mobile) generation of technology.  I really look forward to the conference next year.  Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez!