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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and The Last Great Hope

June 22nd, 2010 by Jim Nasr

Anything that defines the “future of productivity” deserves a welcoming befitting a king: “the lion roars back”! Luscious superlatives take a number…

And now back to our regularly scheduled program… Yes, SharePoint 2010 has arrived (officially since mid-May). Yes, SharePoint 2010 is a good improvement over the previous incarnation (MOSS 2007). And yes, most importantly, SharePoint 2010 taps well into the new (vastly better) Office 2010. And yes, SharePoint 2010 is the silver bullet to fix all your ECM problems. Errr…ok, that’s one yes too many.

Though no silver bullet, and perhaps just a smidgen short of the future of productivity, SharePoint 2010 (and, in my opinion, even more so as a hosted solution) definitely has a place at the table. As with all things hyped and dipped in unlimited marketing resources, the trick is to figure out what is real and what is relevant to your needs. So, consider:

  • Capacity, scalability and performance have improved considerably under SharePoint 2010—no more 2000 item view list limit!! And, Microsoft has done a good job providing metrics, tools and guidelines in this area. SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit hardware, so installation and, in particular, migration from an existing MOSS 03 or 07 platform needs to be planned carefully, even more so than before.
  • SharePoint 2010 integrates very well with MS Office 2010, including Outlook calendaring and, heretofore ignored/talented stepchild, Visio. The most exciting part of this integration is the ability to use and edit metadata across SharePoint and Office. This propels true usability and greases the skids tremendously as far as adoption is concerned. The fact that Office is the reader and editor of choice for a lot of content held in SharePoint makes this integration truly relevant.
  • SharePoint 2010 provides the option for imbedded FAST (the search engine). This is a big upgrade over MOSS 07 and brings enterprise functionality and scalability to SharePoint search.
  • As usual, Microsoft has put focus on usability and in SharePoint 2010 there are some notable application usability improvements (such as the enhanced Ribbon, rules for content storage, smarter folders, a term store to manage taxonomy, offline capability through Workspaces, and, of course, the seamless integration with Office 2010).
  • Ease of development: an oxymoron in MOSS 07—more like lots of development—at least as far as web applications were concerned. SharePoint 2010 promises to be far better with a revamped SharePoint Designer and more web services and UI and functional components out of the box. Also, the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) promises to ease integration with third party applications (such as SAP or Microsoft CRM).
  • SharePoint 2010’s other enterprise-like features: more comprehensive administration capabilities, easier deployment over distributed networks, better backup and recovery options, auditing/compliance features. Notable improvements in breadth and depth of such features over MOSS 07.
  • Surprising improvements in records management capabilities, including the convenient, in-place record declaration. Though SharePoint has claim-to-fame largely for collaboration, and in SharePoint 2010, even more so, with a social networking slant (blogs, wikis, Cloud-tagging, activity feeds into its MySites, etc.), Microsoft has stealthily taken strides to make SharePoint a legitimate records management alternative. SharePoint 2010 is still some way short of the maturity and depth of features provided by the more established records management tools in the market, however ease of use and pull of momentum are definitely in its corner. Watch this space for more in-depth research and opinion to come…

So, some compelling reasons to drink the Kool-Aid. Maybe none more compelling though than its inevitability. Inevitable as, errr, Mr. Know It All not knowing anything at all! SharePoint is here to stay, as proven by the already-out-of-control “SharePoint Sprawl”. Also, frighteningly (CMIS implications aside), Microsoft is quite possibly the only truly one-stop-shop ECM vendor around…not that that’s really all that good: one vendor fits all or the best vendors fit together?

So, buying the hypothesis that it is inevitable, what next? Well, first, what is needed? What does the user need? No tool will solve a problem just because…in fact, in vacuum, it’s likely to compound it. What is the problem? What are the, ahem, six 5Ws (What, Why, Where, When, Who, How)? Back to basics. Yes, clarity, simplicity rule. Don’t let the expensive consultants tell you otherwise. It’s my experience that most of us spend a lot of time and induce a lot of heartburn on edge cases. Spend time on what really matters, and then de-scope and simplify that even more. If, after all that, SharePoint 2010 is still inevitable then consider these three things:

  • What does the user need?
  • What does the user need?
  • What does the user need?

Dilbert on user needs

As engineers, we will spend a huge amount of time and energy on what we would like and what works for us—can’t everything be ext-js, RESTful, Spring Observer, n-tiered, service oriented, virtualized, mirrored, horizontally scaled, run on distributed ESX on redundant 4 way blade servers?! Oh, and, please adhere to the very large and complicated Enterprise IT Policy and System Architecture document (because it’s “Enterprise” it must be the right thing to do, right?!), and to every word of every paragraph of the System Requirements Specification (SRS)—written eighteen months ago by a large committee of “stakeholders”—and be sure to offer up all of the vendor’s glorious catch-all feature-set… Surely, exaggeration to make a point…not really. Bottom line either way: no user: very bloated, very expensive, very politically damning shinny shelfware.

Getting off the user-need soapbox for a second, the next BIG thing to figure out when thinking SharePoint 2010 is migration—nine times out of ten…or maybe 97 times out of 100 it will be needed. Migration from an existing SharePoint (03 or 07) application to the 2010 toolset, migration from a legacy application to SharePoint 2010, migration from another CMS to SharePoint 2010, migration of content and metadata…pick and choose your weapon of choice. Experience tells me that migration is NEVER EASY and its scope is almost ALWAYS UNDERESTIMATED. There are a number of tools that can help, but the solution goes way beyond tool selection; there needs to be a thorough plan (actually a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C and maybe even a Plan D). Oh, and let’s not worry about fixing the sprawl just yet…that’s a much bigger deal!

Not to be a buzzkill, but that’s not all. There is a lot more to consider depending on your specific view of the world. One other thing for sure though is licensing. In the great (and truly annoying) tradition of most Enterprise Software vendors, the licensing is a matrix of variables and if-thens. Every family needs a resident cost-accountant to truly savor such mind-bending aesthetics…

So, SharePoint 2010 represents some interesting opportunities for users and organizations and poses some further dilemma in the ECM space. A definite improvement over MOSS 07 but not (yet?) the iPhone of its genre. Competitors beware, Microsoft is coming…is here.

Lots to look forward to!

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Posted in ECM Industry, SharePoint | 8 Comments »

The Andy Fastow Subtext…

March 4th, 2010 by Jim Nasr

File this under: “what the …”, “huh?!”, “is this ECM related…”, or “let’s bear with it for a bit, it may go somewhere…”.

So for those of you who may not have heard: The Andy Fastow Story is a far-fetched, weird and wonderful fantasy about a man who single-handedly (well almost…with a little help from a few close golfing buddies: Jeff, Ken, Michael, Rick, Ben and David, amongst others) brings down a giant company, nay, a whole industry, tailspins an entire country into recession, causes the loss of tens of thousands of job and billions of dollars of people’s savings, illegally bags tens of millions of dollars for himself and his best buddy Michael, etc… In this little tale, our hero Andy is magically transformed from an Ordinary Joe to Financial Genius with the help of his friend, and self-anointed god, Jeff. Andy then gets to make up “Andy’s World”, where everything is always wonderful for him and all bad things in the real world are shoved into a box called LJM and then a bigger box called LJM2 (and a couple of broken down pales called Chewco and Raptor). In Andy’s World, Andy and Michael get to make up all the rules. Everybody is invited to play in Andy’s World—at a fee. Everybody will win a participation prize. Everybody will lose a whole helluva lot. Errr, except for Andy and Michael of course—they always win. Until one day, when a nosy stranger starts asking questions like “Andy, how do you do it? …like, can you teach me how to stick really bad things into an ordinary box just like yours and have them just disappear and make me loads of money just like you?” Well, one thing leads to another and this nasty thing called the SEC starts poking and prodding Andy’s World, bugging Andy and asking him the same kinds of stuff; except this SEC thing is scary and has some gnarly militia working for it. The nerve of the SEC questioning whether Andy is on the up and up! Of course, just like all good fantasies, after a bout of the uglies (a little public humiliation and a few years outside the comfort of Andy’s World—chilling in an institution near Colorado), our hero rises at the end and gets to fight another day (presumably with some of those millions he bagged earlier). Unfortunately his friends, well except Michael again, didn’t do so well: poor Ken died, Ben and Rick went to jail, David became known as the world’s most infamous shredder, and Jeff was vilified around the world and got blamed for everything bad in Andy’s World. Oh, and, like millions of people’s lives’ got permanently messed up.

Pretty good story, eh?! I’ve even heard some rumors that it’s loosely based on real life…

Dilbert on Enron

Of course the moral of the Andy Fastow Story is that we don’t want another Andy Fastow story. Actually, no more stories at all of that genre. Sadly, it seems to be a trite plot prone to repeat. Who can forget the Bernie Ebbers or the Dennis Kozlowski Story? Or the Lehman and AIG Show? Don’t even start with Maddof! So many copycats, it’s hard to keep track.

The answer to stop these stories, one presumes, is to put in place some controls. Tools that support the controls. And, a scary, ugly and expensive editing process affectionately called the threat of eDiscovery. Oh, and a whole bunch of government type people, lawyers, accountants, bankers and consultants. Now, surely there will never be another Andy Fastow Story. There will never be another Arthur Andersen willing to edit another Andy Fastow Story. In fact, we won’t even need to have any more authors or heroes for these kinds of stories. Our tools will auto-document happy stories where everyone wins and everyone is treated fairly. So, that’s where ECM comes in!

Unfortunately, it seems, again, that reality is just not complying with our carefully thought out plot. Dang! In spite of noise to the contrary, and HUGE vendor propaganda promoting the discovery of gold reincarnated in the all signing, all dancing eDiscovery products tied to ECM solutions, it seems there is a “fiction gap” between is and would-like to be. In fact, records management en-masse (which one would presume to be a precursor to eDiscovery products) is seemingly not much more than email archival these days. All this seems to point to the obvious. What’s the subtext here?

Perhaps the subtext is in the incentives and disincentives. eDiscovery, empirically, seems to be a dance. The goal really is not full discovery or going to court—that would be insanely expensive for most organizations—but a happy settlement, which would be less insanely expensive. Of course to get to the settlement, you still need some level of eDiscovery…to know what is insane and what is less insane! Now, what if eDiscovery were easier? ECM, records management, search and eDiscovery tools all working in unison. A nirvana to be sure. But, would that not potentially lead to greater exposure of being discovered? Would the disincentive of the lengthy, costly and archaic discovery process now be replaced with the incentive of protecting yourself through the same lengthy, costly and archaic discovery process?! Certainly the US government (through the FRCP; Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) doesn’t hope so. In fact, since the December 1, 2006 amendments to the FRCP, effectively dealing with eDiscovery is very much supposed to be on the legal and corporate roadmap of most organizations; moreover they have the burden of responsibility for adequately managing discoverable information at their own cost.

So, where does that leave us? In the spirit of Mr. Fastow and company, I suspect somewhere between pay now or pay later…which is to say, little evidence of much competence at this time. In my opinion, effective and somewhat efficient eDiscovery is directly tied to successful deployment of ECM—properly indexing, managing, storing, retrieving and archiving information, and a streamlined implementation of Records Management—identifying, classifying, retaining and disposing of formal records based on corporate and regulatory compliance policies. I’m sure the eDiscovery vendors would not entirely, or possibly at all, agree with some of these assertions. But then again they may have incentives not to…

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Posted in ECM Industry, eDiscovery, Records Management | 15 Comments »

Destiny's child

February 16th, 2010 by Jim Nasr

Suspense builds. Tension unbearable. As the cards turn…it is, of course, Miss Scarlett (the old fishmonger, Mustard, was never cunning enough to pull this off), with the rope in the (WHAT?!) Library… Those of you with fond childhood, or more recent, memories of Cluedo would have surely related to today’s EMC/Fatwire partnership news. In the worst kept secret category, EMC has effectively chosen to supplant its own Web Content Management (WCM) offerings with Fatwire’s, best in class, offering and in-turn chip in with some DAM going the other way, and, interestingly, only take a minority equity stake at Fatwire.

Solution-wise, this is actually good news for clients…in the longterm: richer functionality, better ease of use, tight focus on WCM, proven winner. Ultimately, WCM to EMC Documentum was the Super G to Tomba la Bomba: good, but not quite Aamodt-esque (apologies in advance for the indulgence in Winter Olympics rhetoric; seemed appropriate though given the wall to wall TV coverage and the three feet of snow we’re in here in DC). However, this direction does pose some intriguing questions:

  • How tightly would Fatwire’s product work with EMC Documentum? Whose repository rules when it comes to WCM? Can the repositories truly co-exist merrily (possibly through CMIS)? Emmm…what happened to the whole one repository thing?
  • What happens to clients’ existing Web Publisher (WP) based solution? Stick with it? Live without it? Migrate to Fatwire? Throw another 3rd party tool in the mix? Start from scratch? Chuck the whole thing and Salesforce.com it?
  • Operationally, who takes the lead, EMC Support or Fatwire? What about overlaps? How about licensing for existing solutions? Functionality vs. Risk?
  • Technically, what’s the impact? What would the security model look like? How do you migrate?
  • If the sunsetting of WDK and WP are both inevitable, what’s the recipe to upgrade? What tools and support will EMC provide to ease the process?

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of questions and sharper minds than mine will surely have scripted-answers for them and more. History, though, tells me to tread with caution. Inevitably, enterprise class solutions are burdened with enterprise class complexity (and likely not just because of the technology). Time, budget, people, skills, political battlegrounds, management knowhow and many other factors may well play a part and tint the lens with which you view the questions.

So, where else might destiny’s child poke its nose? Of course, I don’t know for a fact, nor would want to speculate. However, looking at the gaps in the kitbag of some of the larger ECM vendors, I can’t help but wonder whether the next case management, records management, ediscovery, collaboration (read: Sharepoint) or content migration “partnership” announcement is just around the corner.

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Posted in Content Authoring, Documentum, ECM Industry, Enterprise Content Management, Fatwire, Web Content Management | No Comments »

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