Who’s the Boss, MOSS?
Sharepoint Meets ECM in 2007
and beyond...
(originally presented in late 2007)
Dan Keldsen
Co-founder and Principal at
Information Architected, Inc.
(www.InformationArchitected.com)
Contact:
dk<at>InformationArchitected<dot>com
or 617-933-9655

Who’s the boss, MOSS?
The third wave of MOSS has hit, and Microsoft is waking
❖
up to the problems and opportunities that lie between
raw file servers and large-scale Enterprise Content
Management (ECM).
How is MOSS2007, it’s ecosystem of 3rd party
❖
functionality suppliers and system integrators, and the
broader world of ECM, from “traditional/legacy” to SaaS
and open-source impacting the market?
This presentation is a high-level, strategic and business-
❖
focused view on these issues, with an eye on the future of
ECM and the role of MOSS in that future.

Brief History of Dan
❖ 18 years of Marketing Experience
❖ 17 years of “official” IT Experience
❖ Former Director of IT and CTO of Delphi Group for
13 years, also did Analyst and Consultant work
❖ 3.5 years working within Perot Systems ($3 Billion
USD annual revenue)
Who knew that voting for him meant I’d work for him 12 years later?
❖
❖ Started up AIIM’s Market Intelligence arm, co-ran in
2007-2008
❖ Currently, Co-founder and Principal at Information
Architected, Inc.

This presentation is an ode
to MOSS and the
continuing evolution of
ECM

Borrowing a few lines
from...

Eats, Shoots,
and Leaves
A book about English
punctuation, and the
dangers of misplaced
commas

And with Apologies to
Paul Simon
(“50 Ways to Leave your Lover” - 1975)

There must be... 50 ways
to share your content...

“I just bought MOSS, boss,
Need a new plan, Dan,
Don’t mean to be coy, Roy,
Content wants to be free”

Hint: MOSS is only one
system that can be used,
don’t throw out your old
investments just yet

FYI - it may sound like
I’m very pro-Microsoft
in this presentation

My goal is simply to
show options and
impacts, not that MS
solves the world’s
problems

I’ve been in this industry
for ~14 years...

Still baffled after all
these years...

Why does 80% of
content not make it into
a “content management
system?”

That is the burning
question in ECM...

The short answer?

Affordability,
Usability,
Understanding

One step at a time...

My approach to
presenting is to attack
from multiple angles

and dig deeper with each
orbit around the topic at
hand

Begin Blastoff!

So, who IS the Boss?
Your Technology?
or Your Business?
Technology decisions tend to win... not good.

Not new news - but still
not truly understood

Not this Boss...
from http://www.brucespringsteen.net/

Not this moss...

This Kudzu?
Serious plant overgrowth problem in
Southern States of USA
from http://www.yahoolavista.com/kudzu/barns.html

Definitely
not
“The King”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley and http://www.usps.com/images/stamps/94/elvis.gif

or this
other king...

What then?

Let’s assume an
End goal of:
The “Democratization”
of Information

Meaning that
information should have
more of a vote/value in
the enterprise

Exactly as Bob Boiko
mentioned yesterday (at
CMF2007 in Denmark).
Content Counts!

Specifically it has
VALUE (or had better)
$$$

MOSS as
The ECM
“Singularity?”

MOSS as
The Borg
Platform?

A# Your Content Are
Belong to Us...

2 Biggest impacts in
ECM moving forward

Matrix meets ECM

MOSS

open source

Which option is red?
You’ll have to take the journey for yourself...

Seth Gottlieb has a
session running now -
run quick if you want the
open source story

Both can be “free,”
more on that shortly...

3rd option - not
discussed today

Software as a Service (SaaS)
This is very real folks...

So, what is at the heart
of the technology side of
the business/technology
coin?

The promise of ECM has
been touted for years, yet
we still struggle because...

The old
“new” content
infrastructure
is showing
signs of
breaking, yet
still “works”

What technology?
E-mail, Web 1.0,
“dumb” File Servers, the
desktop & aging ECM
installations

Results in...

Mis-used,
un-used,
and abused
technology
cartoon from: http://blogs.technet.com/tarpara/archive/2007/09/05/evolving-company-culture-starts-with-a-sharepoint.aspx

When technology is
really successful it should
be everywhere...

Like Facebook? Thanks
to BJ Fogg (also at
CMF2007) for that tie
in...

but that can be your
worst nightmare...

Kudzu - It’s Everywhere!
You don’t want it to be...
from http://www.yahoolavista.com/kudzu/barns.html

“Going Viral” is great for
YouTube & facebook,
perhaps not so good for
enterprise software

Like: MOSS, Lotus
Notes, Wikis, Blogs, etc.

Remember...
The “Democratization”
of Information?

On-ramps, off-ramps, on-road
MOSS2007 doesn’t exist by itself in a vacuum - so what are
the inputs, the outputs, and what do you do within the
environment?

MOSS (might)
put the E in ECM

Why MOSS?
“It’s Free”

Free? From Microsoft?

Free as in “someone else
is paying for it”

Free as in “not being
charged to my
department”

Free as in “license to
make a mess, just like my
shared server directory
or inbox”

From: AIIM seminar in
Boston (2007) on
Sharepoint meets ECM

74% of attendees stated
Sharepoint was (ee for
them (i.e. provided as
infrastructure by IT)

Sidenote:
Over one thousand people
registered for a multi-city
seminar on SharePoint meets
ECM. The most popular topic of
our time (like it or not).

This means that life for
all of us who care about
Content is about to
become...

A world of
Ubiquitous Content
Management

But the “masses” will
still have no idea what
we’re talking about...

Which should be expected
That’s how markets and platforms are formed
(Geoffrey Moore - Dealing with Darwin)

Until we provide
frameworks that will
keep this from exploding
on us - again

“I see content...”
“and it’s unmanaged! Aaaggh!”

Just as Microsoft took
the world on a journey of
the OS...

DOS to
Windows 3.1 to
Windows 95

Before it came close to
being “good enough” to
be truly usable

So too, with MOSS...

Now that “the future”
has arrived
(and still evolves)...

How might MOSS
be used?

MOSS as “the”
Repository
Not likely in large-scale deployments

MOSS as replacement
for file servers
Easy path, will get users moving in the right direction

MOSS as millions of
repositories
Major concern!
Kudzu = Lotus Notes = Intranets = Portals = Wikis =
Blogs = IM clients = total chaos

MOSS as the front-end
What most ECM providers and practitioners are
predicting. Content created in MOSS, “managed”
elsewhere.

MOSS as invisible hand
Office 2007 as the “real” interface, and MOSS may be
completely invisible, becoming the “intelligent” ‘save as’
- a web service essentially

MOSS as a way to get
content back out of
“real” ECM
Common problem - users finally have access rights to
drop content in “the repository” - and then can’t get it
out again

“I had live content...”
“But it’s been lost (killed) by my ECM!”

“Clawback” in legal
world...
...is what the experience (many times) is for ECM users
now, due to delays in index updates, poor metadata,
overly tight security settings

Pitfalls to watch for?
(with MOSS or any
other solution)

“Good enough” isn’t
always good enough for
specific uses...

Such as?

Conceptual Search vs
Keyword Search

Portals based on
Recommendation
Engines

Migration &
Transformation between
ECM systems?

Traditional ECM has far
more connectors and
integration points in
place NOW

Upswing of
“MOSS shops” means
this should change
quickly - but we’ll see

How best to use MOSS?

Convert “lower value”
content to MOSS?

From a “traditional”
ECM offering into
MOSS

Move “high value”
content, or “records” out
of MOSS?

MOSS to a dedicated
Enterprise Records
Management solution?

Why?

“Legacy” ECM
High-cost of ownership means that a high percentage
of content doesn’t get into the repository

Mentioned previously as
the 80% of content
“gone missing”

Bottom Line
Traditional Content Management, as typically
deployed, is riddled with holes

Such as...

Content Creation
Is Disconnected from ECM Process
(i.e., not embedded in the process)

(Broken) Content Sharing
The wrong tools being used for the job, because the
“right” tools aren’t usable, or affordable

(Not) Enterprise-wide

(Un-)Managed
Can’t manage what isn’t within reach of ECM

End Goal?

Full lifecycle
management, of all
relevant content,
everywhere.

Because, Regulated or not
Danger lurks in the “wild west” of unmanaged content

But content doesn’t just
come into being at the
end of the process

The “front end” of
content has largely been
the domain of
“productivity tools” but
that’s changing

So, “the real MOSS”
having finally arrived, it
has questioned some
basic assumptions in
ECM

Making the answers
much more obvious

Complexity = Bad

Cheap = Good

Most of a solution, is
better than nothing at all

But, understanding/
education still has a long
way to go...

Some issues still to deal
with though...

From some anecdotal research
through my extended network
on LinkedIn

Backup & Recovery of
ECM is serious business.
Can MOSS handle it?

Non-compliance to w3c
standards. Most ECM
solutions suffer here.

Freedom in this may case
may mean “(eedom to be
tied to MOSS”

Migration within MOSS
product path - not fool-
proof. In fact, can be
quite painful...

Migration from another
system into MOSS, adds
complexity of cross-
vendor conversion = high
fees for consulting work

Built-in search is difficult
to modify to your own
criteria (relevance
ranking, outside systems,
sophistication)

Integration to MOSS is
not as easy as expected
at this stage of evolution

Such as: Lists are not
saved in SQL tables - but
in SharePoint tables
stored in SQL Server

So much for “loosely
coupled” and again,
“(eedom”

How are people extending or
enhancing MOSS2007?

Lotus Notes/Domino
integration for
collaboration, and
application development

Search Solutions (for
more flexible relevance,
federated search,
linguistics, text analytics)

Integration to BI or
ERP solutions

So, in summary...

MOSS2007 is a major
force in this market

And a step along the
evolutionary chain

And if your organization
suffers from...

A high % of content
being unmanaged

Solutions that are too
expensive to justify
expanding in the
organization

Or you have not yet
implemented any ECM

Those are the prime
reasons to look at MOSS

If you have specialized
content applications

Significant investment
(that you’re happy with)
in other ECM solutions

A need to have
distributed/federated
repositories that can
function as one

For now, you should lean
towards “traditional”
solutions as the core

And explore MOSS as
one option to extend the
reach of your investment

Bottom Line

Whether MOSS2007 is
savior or destroyer, we
won’t know for a while...

But extending Basic
Content Services

to eradicate
“dumb servers,” helps to
raise the low end of the
market

And causes higher-end
solutions to worry about
the disruptive threat

Which benefits
everyone in the end

even if the short-term is
a painful transition
period

2009 and
beyond
are going to be “interesting
times” for all of us

Thank you
Dan Keldsen
dk <at> InformationArchitected <dot> com
www.linkedin.com/in/dankeldsen
Find me on Twitter
@dankeldsen
http://twitter.com/dankeldsen