This is part two of a four part series on AIIM’s Automating Document-centric Processes – Is SharePoint Enough?” Seminar. In each case I will start with the title and quote the session description before going into my notes.

Here is the session description: “With the ever increasing speed of business, everyone now wants everything yesterday. We are definitely in a services-based economy where paid access to information is crucial. End users are striving to find better ways to automate data capture and related processing. Learn how the world’s leader in imaging can help you to enable faster processing, easier collaboration, quicker retrieval and better retention.”

Andrew Chapman of EMC Documentum asked the question. Why do customers want enterprise content management (ECM) and Sharepoint? Often they find out that they have both and wonder if this is a good idea. Andrew said that both can work together, which was the consistent theme of all the sessions I attended.  He covered three ways the two can work together.

First there is archiving – You can move something from Sharepoint to ECM. So it is now owned and managed by ECM.  

Second there is aggregation. Sharepoint puts content into SQL server and then the content is moved to ECM so is stored in one place instead. The content is still owned by Sharepoint and managed by ECM.

Third, you can use Sharepoint as a portal into ECM. Here the ECM owns and manages the content.

These three use modes can operate at the same company for different reasons.

 When Sharepoint started doing content management, Documentum first thought it would be competitive. Sharepoint has been very successful. Microsoft sold 100 million seats in a year. Documentum sold 15 million seats over many years.   EMC discovered that Shareppint  is actually an avenue into content management.  So now Documentum sees Sahrepoint as a good thing. They can coexist and Sharepoint gets more people to use ECM.  

There are challenges with Sharepoint as the proliferation of many team spaces can create too many silos. Microsoft recognizes this. Microsoft is working with Documentum for better aggregation. ECM is the 6^th biggest partner with Sharepoint. Documnetum sees Sharepoint as another entry point. Microsoft will focus on making access easier while Documentum can do some of the heavy lifting under the covers.  Documentum provides a web services layer to communicate with Sharepoint plus some additional things to make the communication easier.

Sharepoint is a .NET development platform, as well a collaboration tool out of the box. The latter is the entry point. Companies can move to build more complex applications with Sharepoint .NET pieces. You can end up with applications that do not look like Sharepoint but are built on the platform.

Documentum is working on more ways to integrate with Sharepoint. They want to facilitate getting metadata out of SQL server for better scalability and also aggregate data in one place. Also, SQL server uses more expensive hardware. With Documentum you can move little used content (but still needed) to lower cost storage.  So use Sharepoint when working with the content. Then move to Documentum for long-term storage once the team is longer working on content but the company still needs to store it.

Andrew Chapman writes the blog, Never talk when you can nod where he covers more of these issues. See his post, SharePoint as a replacement for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems? I recently covered some of Documetum’s enterprise 2.0 moves on the AppGap blog – see EMC Documentum Makes a Series of Moves into Enterprise 2.0.