Enterprise Content Management

SpringCM releases SpringCM 5.0 flexible platform

Ron Miller — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:12:32 -0500

SpringCM released a new version of its SaaS software recently when it announced SpringCM 5.0. This version has an innovative twist in that it involves 22 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies spanning imaging, document capture, search, version control, business process automation, fax, email and records management. What's more customers or third-party vendors can mix and match to create customized vertical versions of the software.

Not surprising, SpringCM CEO Dan Carmel sees a lot of advantages to this approach. "The traditional approach of taking an installed system and spending significant sums on customization and integration is cost prohibitive, especially given the current economic conditions. The SpringCM platform allows applications to be developed once and deployed many times, with all the SaaS advantages of low cost, rapid user adoption, and full integration with other systems via web services." In fact, SpringCM has already signed up a number of partners to build these customized solutions including Clickability, Conversion Technologies International, Harding Group and others.

SpringCM has come up with a clever approach here and wrapped it in a Software as a Service (SaaS) package, which provides flexibility at a reasonable price without the worries of installation and hardware investments. As Carmel pointed out, in this economic climate, there is a lot to like about this method.

For more information:
- see the SpringCM press release

Related Articles:
SpringCM news from FierceContentManagement

Could Obama's electronic medical record plan help ECM?

Ron Miller — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:26:03 -0500

Bex Huff, who is a consultant specializing in Oracle Enterprise Content Management, wonders in a recent blog post if President-elect Obama's recent radio address calling for the modernization of medical record keeping would be a boon for content management vendors. It's Huff's contention that it would be, but I'm not sure this particular aspect of the president-elect's plan would help ECM specifically. It could certainly help related industries around scanning and pure document management.

The record itself, the basic data about you as a patient, tends to be structured data, which can be handled in a database, but the pieces that go with your records such as x-rays and aspects of the record that are not yet electronic that need to be scanned could be handled by document management vendors. There is also a business process related to any medical facility, whether it be a family practice or a large medical group, and using content management work flow engines could help move the content from one workstation to the next.

It's clear, as I've written here before (see "From the ashes of the economic meltdown, ECM could thrive"), there will be ample opportunity for ECM vendors as Congress crafts stricter regulations in exchange for all of the money it is giving to various industries to keep them afloat. These and other situations in the coming years could help ECM and related industries continue to do well, even if the economy continues to flounder.

For more information:
- see Huff's blog post

One on One with Andy MacMillan of Oracle

Ron Miller — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:49:25 -0500

Andy MacMillan is VP of Product Management at Oracle where he oversees all aspects of content management including enterprise content management, web content management, digital asset management and rights management. He recently co-wrote a soon to be released book with Bex Huff called “Transforming Infoglut!” The book takes a detailed look at strategy and practical approaches to help organizations gain control of content. We asked MacMillan some questions about content management issues as they relate to the Oracle approach.

FCM: Tell me about your content management solutions?

AM: Oracle provides a comprehensive and integrated set of ECM capabilities as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle content management software includes a unified ECM platform, email and content archiving, imaging and content process automation, federated records management and document-level information rights management.

FCM: You cover the whole gamut of CM issues, from WCM to ECM to DAM and even IRM. Why did you choose to cover everything and how can you do all things well?

AM: Enterprise content management is inherently intertwined. An item placed in a DAM system often gets incorporated into the WCM system and may even have retention policies on it that push it into the RM system. So, customers are looking for a solution that supports this reality and the way they work. Providing all of these functions in a single application reflects this customer demand. It also significantly reduces the total cost of ownership and simplifies the roll out of ECM technology to business users.

As for scaling this model, it is actually rather simple, as our cost of developing on a common platform is lower than it would be otherwise--just like the ownership costs are lower for our customers. We do not have to re-invent similar functionality on different systems or spend resources integrating our own suite of tools since the platform is built from the ground up as a single solution. This approach also allows us to leverage integrations into infrastructure, middleware and applications across the breadth of our capabilities. For example, we do not have to separately integrate digital asset management, document management, imaging, records management, archiving and rights management into each ERP system. We build the integration once and our comprehensive solution provides all of the necessary functionality.

FCM: You recently participated in defining the CMIS standard. Why did Oracle get involved?

AM: Oracle Fusion Middleware is built on open standards and is a large part of our “hot-pluggable” strategy. CMIS looks very promising in terms of providing a comprehensive, platform-independent standard for content management, and we are excited to sponsor the adoption of CMIS by OASIS.

FCM: A Forrester analyst Stephen Powers recently wrote a blog entry that was cast some doubt on CMIS's ability to see the light of day or be widely adopted. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

AM: I think Stephen does a good job of laying out both the challenges and the possibilities for CMIS. Our goal as participants in the development of the standard, and as a vendor in the ECM space, is to overcome those challenges for our customers and make the possibilities of CMIS a reality in the market.

FCM: As the economy worsens and IT budgets inevitably tighten, what is your strategy going to be to sell big systems like content management systems in the coming year?

AM: IT organizations are looking for systems that provide a positive return on their investment and help make their businesses more efficient. Oracle content management software consistently delivers on both of those fronts. Our unified approach provides improved functionality at a significantly lower total cost of ownership than other, disparate solutions. And with our pre-built integrations into Oracle applications and middleware, customers can quickly take significant cost out of their businesses through the roll out of Oracle content management software.

As an example, a large commercial real estate company used Oracle Imaging and Process Management to reduce the cost of its invoice processing from $33 to $2.75 per invoice. Another customer in the same industry reduced its accounts payable cycle by more than 20 days and realized 100 percent ROI within months. Those efficiencies make a real difference in any business environment.

For organizations that are interested in how content management software can have a positive effect on their business, I recommend Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study on Emerson Process Management’s deployment of Oracle Universal Content Management. The report details how Emerson Process Management used the software to save more than $3 million in just four years and provides valuable insight into why content management should be on every IT department’s short list.

FCM: What do you think the biggest issues will be for companies next year around content management?

AM: The consolidation of content silos into a single, strategic content management system and the integration of strategic content management systems into business processes and applications will be the two biggest issues for enterprise content management in the next 12 months.

At Oracle we are focused on helping customers through this transition by:

Helping them identify strategic content repositories, consolidate these systems where possible, and integrate them with traditional business applications to accelerate and improve business processes;
providing federated ECM services to non-Oracle repositories where needed;
and securing content wherever it exists, including on the desktop and beyond the firewall.

Our methodology is based on best practices we’ve developed in working with thousands of customers, and it can be applied across industries.

Alfresco releases Alfresco Enterprise 3

Ron Miller — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:29:58 -0400

Alfresco announced today that it was releasing Alfresco Enterprise 3, it's latest enterprise content management offering. The new release builds on earlier Alfresco announcements around the Sharepoint protocol support, draft CMIS support (which John Newton, Alfresco founder and CTO, discussed in this Fierce interview) and Alfresco Share, the centerpiece of this release that provides support for out-of-the-box Web 2.0 tools.

Newton says that you can use Share to build Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and Wikis inside and outside the firewall as you see fit, enabling you to create communication and knowledge sharing tools for internal and external users. What's more, because this is an open source tool, you can build tools for your organization on top of this solution or take advantage of a growing ecosystem of tools the community is developing.

You can download Alfresco Enterprise 3 for free at Alfresco.com. In addition, you can purchase a Subscription for $15,000 per CPU per year. Unlike most models, which charge by the user, Alfresco charges by the CPU which can scale to many users. The subscription services include quality assurance, support and maintenance.

As you look for ways to control costs in a tougher economic climate, you may want to take a closer look at solutions like Alfresco's. "This is a great opportunity to use a low cost, open source model, and take new types of content collaboration and document management to people trying to reduce costs and be more efficient in a tough economic environment," Newton says.

Report links smaller vendors to lower buying risk

Ron Miller — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:34:33 -0400

In a new report titled "Content Management Tools Can Help Cut Costs," CMS Watch has found that lower cost ECM vendors are thriving and that there is actually more buyer risk associated with choosing a large vendor because of the likelihood it may make substantive changes to the product more often. These large changes force customers to retool. The report also suggests that larger vendors have more trouble "digesting acquired assets."

In what will be a continuing theme in this space in the coming months, companies looking to cut costs and justify large expenditures are going to need to find lower-cost solutions that provide good bang for the buck. As the report points out, you can make a case for ECM because it can make your content more accessible, reduce redundancy and increase productivity by preventing your employees from reinventing the wheel because they couldn't find a piece of existing content.

The report concludes that mid-market vendors represent a smaller risk. But risk, of course, is subjective, and depends on what your requirements are and how well the vendor, whatever its size, meets your needs and objectives in terms of both practicality and cost.

To learn more:
- check out the CMS Watch report here

Gartner releases ECM Magic Quadrant report

Ron Miller — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:18:53 -0400

Gartner released its annual ECM market Magic Quadrant report this week and the big surprise was that Microsoft had been promoted from Visionary to Leader. This is fairly significant because it shows how much Sharepoint has penetrated the enterprise content management space. Just how much Microsoft is influencing the enterprise as a whole, however, is still open to debate.

Just this past week, Alan Pelz-Sharpe wrote in a post on CMS Watch that his research found that while Sharepoint had made significant penetration in the enterprise, it was mostly confined to Microsoft Office documents and not other types of content. What's more, nobody Pelz-Sharpe asked intended to replace existing systems with Sharepoint.

So what does this mean? Microsoft Sharepoint has a role to play in many enterprise content management mixes, but it's not going to replace other content management systems any time soon. It suggests that perhaps the strong growth we have seen from Sharepoint, although significant, could bottom out at some point, especially if companies begin to search for lower-cost replacements for expensive Microsoft Office licenses should the economic slow-down continue.

On one level, Microsoft has a right to be proud of this new designation by Gartner. It shows they are a true player in ECM. Still, be careful as a buyer not to read too much into it.

For more information:
- read the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report
- read Pelz-Sharpe's CMS report on Sharepoint

Gartner predicts recent troubles in financial services will lead to more regulatory compliance

Ron Miller — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:54:52 -0400

Monday was a disaster on Wall Street. Financial services firms continued to get pummeled in the wake of the mortgage crisis and Wall Street responded with a 500-plus point plunge that the Boston Globe dubbed "Black Monday." What does this have to do with content management? Well, it could have a lot to do with it if Gartner is right when it says that the recent troubles on Wall Street could lead to increased regulation that could actually dwarf the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal. Many companies were introduced to enterprise content management because Sarbanes-Oxley forced them to manage their content better, or face serious consequences. In fact, ECM was closely related to regulatory compliance for much of this decade until more recently, when ECM began to shift toward social networking, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

This level of regulation, if it comes to pass, could transform the content management industry yet again, or expand a niche that had taken a back seat to collaboration and knowledge sharing. When you combine that with the news last week about the CMIS content management standard, it could bode very well for the future of the content management industry. Able to sell on several fronts, and bolstered by a standard that opens up disparate content repositories, we might be looking at an enterprise content management renaissance, with your company possibly looking at an increased need in content management services.

For more:
- read this ChannelWeb article
- check out this NetworkWorld article

SpringCM version 4.4 includes records management capabilities

Michael LoPresti — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:06:35 -0400

The recent release of SpringCM version 4.4 made waves in the enterprise content management pool due to the company’s inclusion of records management capabilities in the platform. These capabilities, which add to a solid foundation of document management and process automation, launch SpringCM into a selective group of systems that provide such a broad range of functionality in a hosted software-as-a-service model. Records management constitutes a younger, more elusive component of ECM; when implemented, it can streamline the cumbersome but obligatory processes of compliance and eDiscovery. The records management capabilities in SpringCM 4.4 include support for setting document retention policies, including email. With this set of features, SpringCM is making an aggressive play for dominance in the crowded ECM field.

For more:
- read the article in InformationWeek

You think you've got content issues? Google index hits 1 trillion pages

Ron Miller — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:05:43 -0400

Most large enterprises boast a decent-sized content repository, and if your company deals in high-volume transaction processing like check handling, it reaches another level. Still, no matter how high your volume may be, chances are you aren't dealing with the mega volume that Google has to worry about. Google reached a true milestone last week when it indexed its one trillionth page; a mind-boggling number that shows just what the company is up against when indexing the open web. That Google's indexing capabilities can scale to such heights is very impressive, but what really is amazing about this number is that it doesn't end there; instead, it just keeps growing (some say infinitely) into the future. So stop complaining about your company's content problem. Nothing is impossible, even a trillion pages.

To learn more about this milestone:
- check out Google's blog entry

Interwoven snags e-Discovery vendor Discovery Mining

Ron Miller — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:19:15 -0400

Enterprise Content Management vendor Interwoven took a leap into e-Discovery this week when it purchased e-Discovery vendor Discovery Mining for $36 million. Discovery Mining tackles e-Discovery tasks using a software as a service (SaaS) model. If Forrester Research market growth estimates cited in an eWeek article on the purchase are accurate, the e-Discovery market is expected to grow to $4.89 billion by 2011, up from $1.45 billion in 2006. Given those numbers, it's hardly surprising to see Interwoven looking for a key player in this space that could give it a foothold in this growing market segment.

Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed back in 2002, it has been a critical focus area for many content management vendors because its provisions require careful maintenance of electronic records. That means if a company is called upon by a government audit, or as part of a litigation to produce or review electronic records, it needs to be able to process huge volumes of electronic records to locate key bits of information required by the requesting party. This purchase should complement Interwoven's existing RecordsManager quite nicely, giving them the ability to not only manage and maintain electronic records, but also to retrieve information quickly from the records repository when called upon to do so.

For more on Interwoven's purchase:
- check out eWeek's article