Monday, January 05, 2009

SharePoint in the Life Science sector and beyond ...

Life science companies are traditionally strongholds for typical ECM vendors such as IBM FileNet and EMC Documentum. But what about SharePoint Server 2007? My guess is that SharePoint is being adopted but not as an alternative to the traditional ECM players but as a complement. Especially the collaboration part is being strongly embraced  but with regards to pure ECM functionality I have my doubts - and trust me I'm a strong believer in SharePoint.

Traditional players seem to draw the "be nice to Microsoft and let's integrate with SharePoint" card.  Interesting quote I recently got from a Documentum guy -  "SharePoint has a good UI - probably better then our own ... but if you really need a safe - read compliant  - environment you probably still want to use our tools." 

This means that pure play ECM vendors are moving into the back-end and  their components will be eventually considered as a pure unstructured data storage layer components - similar to the way that we think about relational databases. Is this really the sweet spot that vendors are looking for?

I'm wondering what the Introduction of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification will do to further accelerate this trend?

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