Sharepoint and EMC get jiggy in Vegas (and EMC wants everyone to know all about it)

In case you're not aware of it, the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 is in Las Vegas this week; there's a sold-out crowd (7400 are in attendance-up 92% from last year.)  What a great thing for Vegas' economy and, of course, for Microsoft.

If there's an interesting unarticulated thread common to  technology conferences this year , it's that competing vendors are speaking/exhibiting at each other's conferences and boasting about how nicely their solutions play together. Last week Larry Ellison's frenemy Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com)spoke at Oracle's OpenWorld (post to come). This week it's EMC sponsoring SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC2009).

How into SharePoint is EMC? EMC put a press release with the headline "New EMC Solutions Extend Customer Value of Microsoft SharePoint Server" on the front page of its website yesterday This may not seem like a big deal to those who don't follow EMC marketing, but it is; consider that EMC didn't even issue a press release concerning its agreement to offer CSC's FirstDoc as its preferred regulatory compliance application for the Life Sciences industry (see CSC's press release.) In case any EMC Documentum DCM customers missed the announcement, it's time to start thinking about saying ta-ta to DCM.

Getting back to EMC's declaration of love for (aka interoperability with) Sharepoint, EMC's Bill Galusha blogged long and hard about the subject yesterday. The short story is that EMC has  built a number of Sharepoint connectors including:

• EMC Documentum Repository Services for SharePoint
• EMC My Documentum for Microsoft SharePoint
• EMC SourceOne eDiscovery for SharePoint
• EMC Captiva for SharePoint

Why is EMC doing this? To catch a ride on the SharePoint wave? To demonstrate that Documentum still has a place in an  ECM environment where SharePoint (or anything else) is the primary user interface? Maybe....

But maybe EMC doesn't care all that much about content management or document management anymore; in fact last week a reporter who interviewed Jeff Nick, EMC's CTO called Documentum an "Information Management vendor." Some might say the reporter mis-wrote, some might say I'm picking at semantics; and of course, they , they may be right.

But EMC calls itself an Information Management vendor, does it not? And most of its press releases of late talk about compliance and the "private cloud". So my bet is that EMC will build anything that will allow an EMC product to grab a bunch of information and apply compliance rules around it. And in order to that, you've got to get jiggy with the vendors that enable content creation and manage collaboration and Sharepoint is the biggie at that.

Comments

[shiningarts]

More often than not, a big swarm of flies and vultures gathers around where the meaty road kill is. It’s usually not because of something substantial and technically promising, but to a certain extent, it is instinctive and trendy to do so without thinking. It’s nice to hear that Microsoft Conference 2009 was a sold-out event this week. However, it makes me ponder whether Microsoft is trying to keep up with the Joneses (or the Googles), so to speak, or trying to show real and true innovation. I believe it is the former rather than the latter. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting to check out what is going on with SharePoint 2010 because it affects those of us who use Microsoft’s products day in and day out.

Despite the fact that some pundits are hailing Windows 7, it is a mere fix of its predecessor, the trouble-laden Vista. Although Microsoft had a history of being an innovative software vendor, it has become an old and archaic dino-vendor (a la IBM) who makes living out of the former glories and repackaged products from old applications that are disjointed and inconsistent for the most part. Microsoft tends to produce “new” products that are passé leftovers of the real IT innovators’ ideas. On the bright side, however, there are a lot of very happy “irrationally exuberant” conventioneers in the meadows.

That said, SharePoint 2010 is mostly an extension of the previous versions spiced up with some willy-dilly and ad hoc “sweet nothings” for all on the Microsoft junkyard smorgasbord, which becomes server-side Office products. Yeah, it will attract a lot of developers and customers who are getting sucked into the never-ending hype of Microsoft in spite of the Danger and SideKick incidents: http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10003772/after-microsoft-danger-debacle-emc-touts-private-cloud/

If any small business needs what SharePoint is trying to accomplish, contrary to the praise-purporting pundits, I would recommend going Google first instead. In general, the majority of Google’s apps are open source to use and Google is better prepared with the soon-coming Google Crome OS to be introduced next year for the up-and-coming Cloud Computing model as opposed to Microsoft’s offering.

Most of all, SharePoint’s server sprawling is a huge concern for anybody. It’s kind of like having your brother-in-law come for a visit. At first, you are happy to see him. He is interesting and, maybe he’s just come back from some exotic place with wonderful new tales to tell. But after a while you start to find his socks and underwear in your living room and you start thinking it would be nice if he would pick up after himself. Eventually, if SharePoint (or any other Microsoft application) is your brother-in-law, he leaves thousands of socks all over your house and you end up having to get a whole new house because you are overrun with Bill Gates’ socks and underwear.

In SharePoint, the contents are all stored within its proprietary SQL Server using .NET interface whereas the rest of the world is using Java. This will pose a somewhat difficult situation administratively and developmentally, unlike Documentum whose contents are stored outside of the database. Regardless, neither of these is the optimum solution, whether the documents are stored within or out of database. The best resolution for the unstructured data is not to use a database at all for either metadata or documents. EMC is trying to develop an object-based/oriented information store where the metadata is coupled with the document at the same physical location without using a database. So the information can be retrieved anytime and anywhere regardless of its place and affinity and readily available through an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) schema. Check this out: http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/08/the-future-doesnt-have-a-file-system.html#more

If this innovative and revolutionary paradigm becomes reality, the world of IT as we know it, including the Documentum we used to be familiar with, will be entirely transformed into something new. I, for one, would rather entrust Documentum with the secure information store rather than risking mission critical data on SharePoint, which significantly concentrates in sharable contents rather than securable ones. Ironically, one good sharable point with SharePoint is that it forced the discussion of content management to bubble to the surface. Perhaps, this may help EMC to see the real value of Documentum. If anybody would consider SharePoint for its document management system, it needs to think twice before committing.

[Ed Alexander]

Can you say web services? SharePoint (2007 and 2010) are SOA based products that are actually quite open and mature. Interoperability with other platforms (both at the UI level and underneath the covers is easy to achieve and usually "off the shelf". If you don't see that SharePoint is a leader when it comes to pushing the open source community and overal integration and functinoality in a CMS/Web 2.0 framework... take a closer look.

Ed Alexander (http://www.edalexanderconsulting.com)

[nintendo dsi r4]

I thought this was a very interesting article, and I was wondering when the long term strategy of EMC would manifest itself in relation to DM and Collaboration.

I used to dance a lot in the Documentum world, but for the past couple of years we have strayed into the open source side of ECM, working predominantly with Alfresco.

It is very interesting to hear how organisations are looking to leverage both Documentum from a DM aspect, and Sharepoint from a Collaboration aspect.

We have been undertaking a number of these projects, but utilising Alfresco DM and Alfresco Share in exactly the same way.

It is good to see that the propriatary software folk and the open source alternatives all seem to be agreeing on the right approach to tackling your complete content lifecycle management.