Tagged: SharePoint
It is the User Experience!
I have been at the receiving end of so many surprises while using web or mobile applications during the past couple of years. Many features we earlier thought were possible only in native desktop applications have been prevalent in newer web applications. The mobile did take the usability quotient to an entirely new plane. I today have the freedom to discard an application because I don’t like the color of the footer text! There will be a hundred other applications out there that can replace the discarded app on my mobile screen or browser! User simply is the king now and there is only one thing that differentiates a good app from a great app. The user experience!
The paradigm has shifted decisively in the users’ favor. Now we don’t like that monolithic app that solves anything and everything for us. We like to get a small job done by an app, and that too extremely well. The consumer apps of today are so focused only on what they do right.
Now switch over to the enterprise. We see the world upside down! The majority of enterprise applications still come from the old school. We have large, cluttered, and feature stuffed applications that don’t care much about the poor user. The enterprise user cannot reject or even refuse to use an application because she didn’t like the layout. She is forced to use the app even if it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Enterprise applications typically have very long implementation cycles. By the time an app is implemented it would have become obsolete. Most of the time the users don’t have any say in how the app should be built. It comes from the top (or more accurately, from IT)!
ECM systems have been notorious for the worst possible user experience loads of money can buy. Implementers of FileNet, IBM CM, Documentum, OpenText etc. spent years trying to provide acceptable user interfaces to their customers. Every ECM services vendor had their own UI framework. The users were at the receiving ends of the ECM product vendors’ as well as the service vendors’ whims and fancies.
Then came SharePoint, letting the users breathe a bit of fresh air in terms of acceptable user experience. Along with it came (or rather got popularized) the idea of mashups and widgets (web parts). The need of the hour became supporting the SharePoint user interface or something similar. There were many end customer implementations with SharePoint as the end user interface for traditional ECM systems. Many of the ECM vendors such as IBM started popularizing their own SharePoint emulations. Remember WebShpere Portal and portlets, mashup center and widgets etc.
Recently IBM moved along the path of IBM Content Navigator (ICN), the panacea for all user interface woes experienced by ECM users in general, and FileNet/IBM CM users in particular. One need not use the Mashup center or WebSphere Portlets to build a good ECM user interface anymore! Now there is a new user interface platform for all IBM ECM solutions. What is more, it can talk to other ECM repositories using a CMIS interface. Recently ICN inspired IBM Case Manager as well and thus we have an entire stack of ECM and case management solutions with the ICN front end.
ICN also follows the trusted model of UI container and widgets. ICN in my opinion would have been a revelation if it had come way earlier. It is at least 10 years late to the market. ICN would have made perfect sense in the early 2000s where the whole FileNet market was suffering from its Workplace and customizations on it. Come 2014, the world has moved way far ahead and the users understand what a good user interface is. I see developers and architects struggling to get fonts changed or field alignments adjusted in a custom ICN widget. What can easily be done in HTML5 takes quite a lot of work-around in an ICN widget implementation. What I have seen is that the container and widget model user interface framework works best if the intention is to get any number of scroll-bars anywhere on the screen!
Providing user experience has evolved into an art and there are enough and more people out there who do it very well. Leave it to those professionals. The customers should engage UX professionals in any enterprise application project. The ECM vendors should provide easier ways of accessing their services so that others can build the user experience. The CMIS initiative is a great way of unifying content repository services. Let there be similar approaches to case management or BPM as well. There should be web APIs that can take and spit out simple data representations such as JSON. Let the UX people do the rest.
ECM Magic Quadrant
It’s been a month since the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM report is out and I am sure that innumerable discussions have already taken place on the subject. This is another circus that runs every year that causes emotions such as anticipation, ecstasy, dismay, and indifference. To cut the introduction short, like every other person on the planet I too have my own opinions about the report.
The MQ over the years has been more or less static with a few surprises here and there. The leaders have always been leaders and the niche players have always been so for a while. Xerox and Alfresco have been permanent dwellers of the Visionary column for 4 years in a row. The Challengers column has always been scantily inhabited with Perceptive Software being the lonely face there till last year. Even the analyst team remains similar with three of them being in the seat for past 5-6 years at least. I am sure everybody (the readers and even the authors) was thoroughly bored of the same mundane stuff. So Gartner decided to put a twist to the story this year! Oracle now falls out of the Leaders quadrant and move to the Challengers column. Also to keep the tradition of the Challengers column housing only one vendor, they move Perceptive to the Leaders column. A truly inspiring move!
I am a little puzzled about two things: The utility as well as the credibility of this report. Vendors had always used this chart for their advantage. If the product that you are endorsing is mentioned in the MQ, it is a selling point by itself. If your product is in the Leaders quadrant, then you highlight it in every possible collateral or presentation. Beyond this, I have not seen it being of any help to anybody involved. I have not had a customer who chose a product because it is positioned as a leader in the MQ. If the customer chose an IBM or Oracle it had nothing to do with MQ. It is because the product is from IBM or Oracle. Period. From that count, Oracle doesn’t have anything to worry about their position in this year’s MQ. They are just fine!
The credibility of this report is something that I have an issue as an ECM professional. Let us take the curious cases of 2 of the top vendors: Microsoft, and Oracle.
Microsoft stormed into the Leaders quadrant in 2008 after a 2-year internship in the Visionary column and in the Niche Players column before that. SharePoint continues to impress Gartner. It is a bit puzzling to understand how SharePoint continues to be evaluated highly. The weightage for the ranking as published by Gartner for 2013 is as follows:
Document Management (15%), Image Processing Applications (18%), Workflow/BPM (22%), Records Management (13%), WCM (7%), Social Content (15%), Extended Components (10%)
When you compare OpenText or Documentum with SharePoint on these criteria, I am puzzled as to how SharePoint can be evaluated higher!
I have always seen Oracle (even Stellent before the acquisition) in the Leaders quadrant. So I don’t understand how they can slip so much in 1 year from being the second best last year! They have not made such drastic reversals in the product or strategy to justify the drop. There is nothing in the report that convinces me to believe that Oracle messed up so badly. I am wondering what happened there? Are there other considerations that are not explicit?
Besides when I examined the strengths and cautions sections of the past 6 MQs, the blurbs are the same or very similar. The relative positions of the dots in the chart vary slightly every year for all the players. No justifications for such changes are provided by Gartner. I won’t be surprised if there was an MQ dart board and the authors are just practising their art every autumn!
ECM 101
This blog is all about ECM (Enterprise Content Management). I got into this domain accidently about 15 years back and stuck with it almost forever. Like any other technology vertical, ECM also has far too many facets. My comfort zones are content and process management, case management, capture, records management, and forms management.
AIIM, the premier ECM industry association, defines Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
ECM, according to me, is all about managing unstructured information and making it available to business transactions. Structured information is data that is defined with attributes and are kept in transactional information systems. Plainly, all the data you can put into database tables and search for is structured information. Anything else could fall into the unstructured category. This could include paper documents, office documents, emails, faxes, images, audio, video etc. Statistically, about 20% of all information that an organization deals with fall into the structured category. This means that a huge load of information lies in unstructured format and it is always difficult to search for and retrieve. ECM fits right there.
ECM is a matured industry with thousands of players present across market bands. While the small and medium segments are crowded with plenty of product vendors, the enterprise segment saw major consolidations in the past couple of years. The discussions in this forum is aimed primarily at the enterprise segment which is dominated by IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Oracle, and of course Microsoft SharePoint. Other interesting options would be Alfresco and SpringCM.
ECM technologies and products are always complemented by Capture, DW & BI, and DRM. It would be interesting to analyze on how these technology solutions can co-exist with ECM.
The blog however will be heavily inclined to technologies such as FileNet, SharePoint, and Alfresco since the current authors have quite a bit of experience on these technologies. We are planning to induct more authors with diverse platform backgrounds, so that at some point #ECM becomes a blog site with a comprehensive ECM view.
#ECM 