Sometime between the age 30 and 45 men loose their minds. It’s called a mid-life crisis. You go to your high school reunion compare yourself to the jocks, cheerleaders and geeks you went to school with and take stock of your life. The old joke is that you hit this phase and get a new wife, a new car and a new job. Congratulations Microsoft - at 33 you’ve hit your crisis.

I can’t help but think that Microsoft took a good look at Apple and decided to start dating again. (more…)

Every CMS vendor I know of is falling all over themselves to release a SnarePoint connector. (yes I meant to spell it that way) It’s like the scene in Shrek where Donkey bounces up and down yelling “Pick Me! Pick Me!” Ektron just announced their integration a few weeks ago. Marko covered the Case Management Framework from Open Text just the other day. On the surface it seems like a great idea to take advantage of the 1 billion dollars in sales the Microsoft has managed to amass and give users something useful to do with it. The problem is - as SnarePoint matures, it will improve. There is no incentive for Microsoft to hold back and not add capabilities that real CMS vendors offer while you are out there peddling their wares for them. Eventually, past and potential customers of these pimped out packages are going to start to say “Tell me again. Why do I need you too? ” The fact will be - they won’t need you. What are you going to do then?

Well if this week’s announcement that Open Text will be offering case management on top of Microsoft SharePoint isn’t a wink across the bar to Microsoft then it must be a white flag of surrender. The support that they are offering the SharePoint platform has one major component missing that similar applications have, an integration to their repository and some of the features they do mention I believe Microsoft would say they already do have them like records classification, search, and a rich client, though not desktop. It seems to me like they’re giving up and basically saying look we have a client that works on top of MOSS and if their’s been one major selling point for MOSS it has been that they have a great UI. But I guess the real question is how much will the product cost. Maybe someone at Open Text read our blog.

Note - For those of you not familiar with how a press release works the fact that there is neither an “About Microsoft” section nor a Microsoft press contact means that this was written exclusively by OpenText with no endorsement from Microsoft. Also known as, “this was not a joint announcement.”

Today the other shoe dropped and Microsoft announced a bid for Yahoo! But wait, didn’t they just buy a search company? Now - what was it called again. Oh, never mind that. Yahoo! is much cooler and comes with those nifty ad revenues.

Microsoft announced a 1.2 Billion dollar takeover bid for FAST Search and Transfer, the underlying search engine for Documentum since they abandoned Verity with D5 release. This change was one of the most complex and vexing administrative changes for long time Documentum users. EMC announced this morning a new OEM agreement with Autonomy which bought Verity in 2005. These moves have enormous impact on the EMC Content Management community and will be especially disturbing for those struggling with upgrades and support planning. - More on this later…