My Burton Group colleague Guy Creese's take on the EMC/Microsoft news; read the full post for his analysis.
EMC Documentum and Microsoft today announced an alliance that integrates SharePoint 2007 with EMC's Documentum products. Some of the high points are:
- Users will be able to use the Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 user interfaces as ways to put content into the Documentum repository. All of a sudden, users -- especially casual users -- won't have to go to Documentum training to use the Documentum system.
- EMC Documentum will be creating a set of Web Parts to integrate search, workflow, and content between Documentum and SharePoint.
- There are two deployment options. Companies can use the Office/SharePoint UI to put documents into Documentum only, or can put documents into both SharePoint and Documentum.
So what does all this mean?
Source: Pattern Finder: EMC's Getting Out of the Way of the SharePoint Train
4 comments:
For the near term I do not think the announcement means anything. The glue between Documentum and SharePoint was all developed by the Microsoft partner Vorsite.
I do not think Documentum will put much skin in the game unless they see increased sales (or the reduction of lost deas to SharePoint).
I disagree -- EMC Documentum could have chosen to compete with Microsoft in content management, and they've opted to partner instead. Also, it doesn't matter who developed the integration code as long as it meets EMC Documentum customer requirements.
Peter,
The formal alliance announcement between Microsoft and EMC reflects to a phenomenon that has not received much analyst/media coverage to-date - the way SharePoint seems to have evolved into a user-directed, almost renegade application that conflicts and competes with top-down enterprise-mandated ECM rollouts (like EMC Documentum) in many dimensions - as evidenced by the statement "Our end-users have already installed a lot of SharePoint 2003 and we figure it's only going to get worse with 2007".
I suspect that Microsoft's interest in a formal alliance is primarily to blow an additional trumpet in the Office 2007 release orchestra - more for the consumption of the media than any real market benefit (since companies like Vorsite have been offering integration services like for existing versions of Office for a while now in any case - an upgrade to Office 2007 is not perforce required to access the mentioned functionality).
I tend to agree with Russ that for Documentum, this is largely a costless "testing the waters" play to possibly build up an argument as a high-powered cousin to Sharepoint some day down the line...
Notes customers have faced a similar dilemma for more than 15 years; without appropriate governance/policy/etc., empowering tools can get out of control.
In any case: there should be no doubt about Microsoft's enterprise content management aspirations; SharePoint v3/2007 is only the first step.
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