Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks

by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007

Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.

It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right "fit" for your specific needs.

Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again "leadership" status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor's corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.

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2 comments:

Ahmed Hammad said...

Hossam, I tried to install Alfresco, but it seems very complex, so I deferred it to a later date.

I tried xwiki, it is feature rich and allow for programming if you want. It was easy to setup and use. Could you please explain the difference between xwiki and content management system?

Regards,
Ahmed

h.o.s.a.m.r.e.d said...

Ahmed,

ECM or Enterprise Content Management , Is and Industry wide market products.
it includes products like :
1)SCANNING
2)DOCUMENT IMAGING
3)FORMS PROCESSING
4)INDEXING
5)etc....

see http://www.aiim.org/about-ecm.asp

i.e it is a wide spectrum of applications focusing on Content and how to turn nowadays paperwork to electronic and how to manage and collaporate the electronic content.

xwiki is in this domain of products but limited to HTML documents.