I’ve read it argued that CMS vendors in general might not have to worry so much about SharePoint competition because its only a Collaborative Content Application. The rest of the models are safe. If you have a web content management (WCMS) or a records management product there is no reason to worry because MOSS is really just about Office documents. I don’t disagree that it is mostly a collaboration tool today. Unfortunately no one bothered to tell Microsoft that this is all it is. I assure you they aspire to much more. If you don’t believe me, read it from them. Despite their acknowledgment of the role ISV’s play, their consistent use of ECM services nomenclature belies the strategy.

From a customer’s perspective, what’s wrong with SharePoint really. The answer? - nothing time won’t fix. It is no worse than any of the other major ECM players were 10 years ago. (more…)

I was reading Johnny Gee’s BLOG and his article “Why can’t search be more like Google?” and I flashed back to a day in 1998 when several of us were invited to the Demo Room of Building 1 at Documentum. There the ten of us were introduced to Project Alchemy, which would later become the first web client from Documentum. We were given a 45 minute demo of the product and then asked if there were any questions. After a few moments of silence someone in the audience broke the dam and suddenly the questions started flowing, “why this” and “why not that?” Finally our barrage of questions was stopped by another question, “well what does a web UI look like then?” Our combined audience voice replied, “Yahoo!”

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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?