Andrew Conry-Murray has written a good article in InformationWeek about the integration of collaboration software with enterprise content management. The article is titled, A New Approach To Collaboration And Enterprise Content Management. The article focuses specifically on Microsoft's Sharepoint and Alfresco's Share being utilized with or sometimes replacing the traditional ECM products.
ECM products like Documentum have come a long way from their origins moving certain content through specific business processes, such as loan origination or check processing. This is still their primary role, but ECM vendors are broadening their scope to help companies manage new content types and encourage collaboration. Where does that leave your choices?
Companies will always have a mishmash of content repositories to deal with, so it makes sense to build a software layer that can reach into all them to apply uniform policies
I have only one complaint about the article, the article is poorly titled. The process and workflows being described are not a new approach for enterprises, but rather an ongoing approach for bringing collaboration tools into an enterprise's content management system.
Many of us had originally thought that bringing Enterprise 2.0 into our organizations would be as easy as installing software on the server. What we're finding is that for many of our workers, collaboration of content within an organization sometimes requires signficant changes to our business culture. New ideas and new approaches are always welcomed. However if you really want to see true collaboration in the enterprise, it is not always new approaches that are needed but a recommitment to the Enterprise 2.0 projects you started months ago.
