Oil and Gas

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to get opinions and experiences with regards to the use of traditional Enterprise Content Management systems (ie: Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, etc.) and Microsoft SharePoint (especially in an O365 environment).

We are currently running Documentum and are rolling out SharePoint 2013 O365 and are trying to determine which is the best way to leverage both platforms in order to get the greatest value. In your opinion what are the strengths/weeknesses of each?  Has anyone moved from a traditional ECM platform to strictly SharePoint and if so what was it successful? If not successful what were the pain points and what have you done to resolve the issues?

 Cheers,

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Brad Fox
Irving Oil Refining G.P.

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Hi Brad,

Your choice of content management system will depend on your requirements and budget would be my general answer. Not every ECM is the same. At Shell we are standardizing on SharePoint (private cloud) for all our ECM needs, but like any other application, SharePoint is not perfect. Most of our challenges are in migrating from other legacy platforms and the complexity of our huge organisation with many moving parts... not necessarily SharePoint specific issues, but they have an impact on our SharePoint set up and implementation.

Perhaps you can share with us what some key requirements are that you are looking to address, so we can focus our answers?

Dennie

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Dennie Heye
Business Analyst Information Management
Royal Dutch Shell
The Hague
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Hi Brad,

I missed responding to this post months ago I hope this could still help you. I am an absolute fan of SharePoint because as a platform I can build a variety of information management solutions on top of it while leveraging on licenses that most companies have already invested on.

However, choosing the technology to use really depends on the challenges you have in your current ECM implementation. The traditional systems are dependable for what they claim to do, however when you move to a platform like SharePoint which provide some of the traditional functionalities and provide so much more in the collaboration and KM aspects of IM it would make your head spin and get dazzled with its infinite possibilities.

So if you are still in the early stages of your ECM implementation I suggest sticking to traditional systems. If you think you are already mature in your ECM implementation then SharePoint could offer you so much more.

One thing apparent in all the migration projects I've been involved in and spearheaded, it would have been a simpler and cheaper exercise if the ECM issues have been dealt with first prior to migration.

Just my viewpoint I hope it helps.
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Maria Concesa Lim
Consultant Information Manager
DataCo Ltd.
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I agree that it really depends on the requirements of your organization. We use both SharePoint 2013 on prem and OpenText solutions for several reasons. Currently we are exploring using SP2013 for records management purposes but it is primarily a collaboration and portal platform. We are working towards connecting our systems using technologies to surface OpenText information in SP and using enterprise search to find information across platforms. The objective is to make information readily accessible and findable. I expect that in the future we will do more with Office 365.

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Julie Hudak
ECM Business Content & Collaboration
Husky Energy PRIME
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Hi All,

There are some intersting points in this discussion. What I find interesting is that sometimes you have organizations using more than one ECM product (ie SharePoint and OpenText) to fulfil their requirements. I guess that is the challenge the various vendors have. To provide enough functionality to be the sole provider for services at a client site.

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Tita Atang
Senior Consultant
Venture Information Management
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