At least twice a week I get calls from a IT Managers or Business Process owners who want to chat about ECM Technologies. They're not looking to me to get the same kind of information they get from Gartner or Forrester or Alan Pelz-Sharpe; they want to know what the folks who are working with or using a specific technology think about it. I'm a pretty good source of information in that regard because I talk to somewhere between 50-100 people a week, all of whom are somehow involved in the ECM space.
The questions these ECM-shoppers tend to ask are:
We're shopping for an ECM technology to do xxxxx. Do you know of anyone who has used [insert ECM technology] to get that done.
Do you know what the pain-points were?
Did the user community accept the solution? If yes, did they like it?
I almost always answer these questions with as much detail as I can. I often offer to introduce the information-seeker to someone who has already done what they want to do. I usually get follow-up calls. They're invariably about "people "; namely, , how hard is it going to be to find the people that can make this work? And when they leave, how hard will it be to replace them?