Who's the Boss, MOSS?

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

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?

“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

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Who's the Boss, MOSS?

by Dan Keldsen on Feb 22, 2009

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Who’s the Boss, MOSS? — Presentation Transcript