The New York Times features an article about Microsoft SharePoint in their August 7th online edition. Despite the economic downturn that also contributed to the first ever drop in Microsoft Windows sales, Microsoft SharePoint sales are driving. With more than 100 million sold licenses and deployments in more than 17,000 organizations, Microsoft SharePoint is one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft’s history.
Interoperability between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Suites is becoming increasingly important. Gartner dedicated a whole section to this topic in its recent “Magic Quadrant for ECM” report. The biggest reason for this push appears to be that one size does not fit all.
ECM Suites are intended to solve all your content management needs. In reality, however, each Suite only has a few core competencies. For example, while Microsoft SharePoint is being touted for its strengths in document collaboration, the suite has many weaknesses including archiving functionalities. As a result, ECM customers end up deploying multiple ECM Suites to fulfill their content management needs. One Gartner survey has shown, in fact, that “69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.”
Multiple ECM Suite deployments are expensive and introduce additional complexities to already difficult to use applications. While ECM vendors are not about to give you a buy-1-get-1-free coupon, they do recognize the potential in seamless interoperability between their and competing products. After all, the vendors recognize that each ECM Suite is being touted for a few core competencies. So, the easier it is to deploy multiple Suites, the better the chances of selling an additional ECM Suite to a customer who already has a competing product deployed.
