Alan Pelz-Sharpe came over to London in December 2010, and met with James Lappin to record this podcast.

Alan had recently delivered a training course where he dealt with the traditional enterprise content management suites (Open Text, Documentum etc.) on day one, and Microsoft's SharePoint on day two.   We discussed whether or not SharePoint can meaningfully be called an enterprise content management system, and conclude that it can, albeit with significant points of difference from the traditional suites.

Alan expressed scepticism about the impact of cloud and mobile devices on enterprise content management buying decisions in the short term.  His experience had been that whereas vendors of cloud services were making a lot of noise about the cloud, the organisations that he helps with buying decisions were not yet considering in the cloud.  Alan said that he could not see business critical information moving to the cloud any time soon.

We also discussed:

• The future prospects for Microsoft Office
• The challenges posed for the implementation of retention schedules by the fact that cloud providers replicate information across different servers and different datacentres to maximise availability and up-time.   How would it be possible to guarantee that all instances of a particular document or piece of information had been deleted?

Lee Dallas is one of the brains behind Big Men on Content - an incisive independent blog on the world of enterprise content management, which Lee created together with Marko Sillanpaa.

Lee works for EMC on partner system engineering.

In this episode Lee discusses the future of enterprise content management with James Lappin.  Lee said that the rise of SharePoint had been the major trend of the last five year.  But the major trend of the next five years would be the need for enterprise content management systems to react to the challenge of mobile devices.  Lee explains why transitioning ECM systems to smaller mobile devices is far from straightfoward.

James and Lee discussed the limitations of the 'document' as a format, and speculate on what formats might emerge to improve on it.  This gave Lee an opportunity to explain his view that in IT, nothing ever dies.

This podcast was recorded on 30 September 2010

On the afternoon of 29 July 2010 Angela Ashenden (Principal analyst at MWD) met with Alan Pelz-Sharpe and James Lappin  They discussed how collaboration and social computing fit in with enterprise content management.

• Should organisations seek to use the social computing functionality of their preferred enterprise content management vendor (SharePoint, Documentum, Opent Text, Oracle etc.), or are they better off with a niche social computing vendor? 
• Why are organisations more likely to introduce a system for collaboration than for records management?

To kick off the ECM Talk podcast series (and to take advantage of the fact that Alan was over in the United Kingdom on holiday), James Lappin and Alan Pelz-Sharpe met up in Winchester on the 29 July 2010 to discuss records management.

James argued that the problem records managers hav is not convincing people that records management is important, but rather in convincing organisations that there are feasible steps that they can take to improve their records management.

Alan talked about the danger of organisations assuming that if they purchased software that met standards such as MoReq and DoD 5015 then their records management needs were covered.

We went on to discuss the pros and cons of e-mail archiving systems - with James questioning whether an e-mail archiving system can function as a useable information resource within an organisation.