In this podcast Brad Teed (CTO of GimmalSoft) and James Lappin discuss whether or not SharePoint can be regarded as a records management system.  

Brad says that it can be regarded as a records management system with the caveat that it may not do things in the way that traditional records management systems do them.   James concedes that SharePoint 2010 has records management features (such as holding and applying retention rules, holding a hierarchical classification, locking documents down as records) but feels that these features are not brought together in a coherent enough way to justify calling SharePoint a records management 'system'.

SharePoint 2010 offers organisations two different approaches to records management - the in-place approach and the records centre approach. Brad and James describe and critique  these two different approaches .   James characterises the choice between them as being like that between 'a rock and a hard place'.

Brad describes the challenge of managing the routing rules necessary to get documents from SharePoint team sites to the record centre. James describes the problem of in-place records management which leaves records scattered around team sites under the control of local site owners without providing any reporting capability to give a records manager visibility over them all.

Brad and James will be debating the issue of records management in SharePoint live at the SharePoint Symposium in Washington on 2 November 2011

James Lappin asks Alan Pelz-Sharpe 10 questions about the current state of the enterprise content management market 

Here is a flavour of some of Alan's answers - there is a lot more detail in the actual podcast itself

Why have HP bought Autonomy?

Alan said that most analysts were surprised at how much HP paid for Autonomy.  The best guess at what HP (a hardware company) wants to do with Autonomy (a software company) is that they may wish to create some kind of appliance which has Autonomy's IDOL search engine already loaded onto it (a bit like the Google search appliance).  One thing that HP and Autonomy have in common is that they have both bought well-regarded electronic records management systems (Tower and Meridio respectively), and done very little with them.

How hard have the ECM vendors been hit by the rise of SharePoint?

Alan said that the ECM vendors haven't bit hit as hard as you might think. Their revenues are still rising, and most of them enjoy good relations with Microsoft.  

How does EMC and Open Text compare with the bigger ECM vendors (Oracle and IBM)

Alan said that Oracle and IBM are so big because they do a huge variety of stuff as well as ECM.  But at the end of the day if you are buying FileNet from IBM you are dealing with the FileNet division, not the whole massive company. So for buyers of ECM systems company size doesn't matter that much.  Open Text is the largest company that focuses exclusively on ECM.   EMC's business is mainly about storage.  They bought Documentum, but Documentum is very different from the rest of the EMC group and there has not been many synergies.

What is happening in the CRM (Customer relationship management) arena and how does it relate to ECM?

Essentially ECM and CRM are seperate worlds without much overlap.  CRM is a vital tool for many organisations.  As yet there is not a great deal of tie-ins with ECM.  Oracle has both a CRM and an ECM suite, which work together reasonably well.  SAP signed a large deal with Open Text but there doesn't seem to be a huge number of organisations using SAP together with Open Text products.  Many of the CRM tools will do a little bit of document management of customer related documents, but for the most part organisations will have CRMs that don't talk to whatever ECM product(s) they have

The Europeans have just revised their electronic records management specification (MoReq2010).  When will the US records management standard DoD 5015 be revised (it was issued back in 2007)

Alan said he didn't know of any plans to revise DoD 5015.  SharePoint drove a horse and cart through DoD 5015 because Microsoft made the decision to release a document management product that did not comply with it but had huge market success.  Vendors didn't like DoD because it was very hard for them to tailor their products to.

What is happening in the intranet arena?

Alan said that nothing dramatic is happening in the intranet arena.  Some intranet makeover projects will have been hit by the economic downturn.  Alan can't understand why some organisations want to use the same product to manage there external web-site and their intranet - to him they are fundamentally different things.

Do you know any organisation that manages their e-mail well?

Alan said that of all the ECM implementations that he sees, the type that gives the quickest and most reliable return on investment is an e-mail archiving tool brought in to take stored e-mails off the mail servers.

What do you think of PAS 89?

Alan thought PAS 89 good attempt to define the scope of enterprise content management, although he can't think of what an organisation would specifically use it for.

How does Alfresco compare with the proprietary ECM products 

Alan said that if we were talking about open source ECM products Nuxeo should be mentioned alongside Alfresco. Both of them are established, mainstream enterprise content management systems.  The main difference between them and the proprietary ECM products is the licensing model.

How does Google Apps compare with the established ECM products 

In terms of impact on the ECM market Alan is more interested in Box.Net than Google Apps.  Alan and James discussed the prospect of new start ups deciding not to set up shared drives and instead using services like Box.Net in the cloud to provide a relatively simple place for colleagues to store and share documents.  

In this episode Alan Pelz-Sharpe discusses the current state of ECM in Brazil with Walter Koch .   Topics they cover include:

• the project undertaken by Brazilian banks to move to scan cheques and process them electronically.  Hitherto 72 aeroplanes per night have been needed to move cheques around the country - in future cheques will be imaged at the branch at which they were received, and then, once processing is complete, the hard copy will be destroyed without the original cheque having been moved
• the dramatic rise of SharePoint in Brazil - Alan said he went to Brazil's main ECM show in 2008 and saw virtually no mention of SharePoint.  He went to the same show in 2010 and SharePoint dominated the show.  Walter said that to accomodate SharePoint the ECM show in Sao Paulo September 2011 will split into two -  an ECM show, and a SharePoint show, both running alongside each other, both the same size.  Listening to Walter it strikes me as amazing that one ECM product (SharePoint) has grown to warrant the same size of conference as all of the rest of the ECM world put together.
• key ECM vendors in Brazil-  Walter says that the same big 5 companies Oracle, Open Text, IBM, EMC and Microsoft are dominant in the Brazilian market as elsewhere in the world, but that there are also some local players
• Walter's observations on ECM in the Middle East, and on the recent Info 360 event in the US

This podcast was recorded on the 19 July 2011, and lasts for 31 minutes

In this episode analyst Ralph Gammon, author of the Document Imaging Report newsletter and blog, joins Alan Pelz-Sharpe and James Lappin to discuss the the state of the market for document capture software

Capture software, such as Kofax and Captiva,  is used to make sense of scanned documents.  It is typically used to apply optical character recognition (OCR), or barcode recognition, to scanned documents.  

More sophisticated use cases involve integrating a capture product with an enterprise content management system (ECM), an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) such as SAP, or a line of business (LOB) application.  The capture product might be used to identify what type of document a scanned image is, and to kick-off an appropriate workflow within an ECM/ERP/LOB application. Or the capture product might be trained to help with form processing where a large volume of paper forms are received and scanned.  The role of the capture product might be to read the entry in each field of the form and place that entry in the appropriate metadata field within the ECM/ERP/LOB, which could then trigger an appropriate workflow.

Ralph identified the main value that capture software brings as reducing keystrokes- reducing the amount of manual effort needed to make scanned images of paper documents useable by an organisation on their electronic systems.  Alan points out the downside of this -  some large capture projects result in job losses.

Alan said that many of his clients think that Kofax and Captiva are the only players in the Capture market.  Ralph said that many of the traditional ECM vendors have some sort of partnership with a capture vendor.  EMC (owners of Documentum) own Captiva.  IBM bought Datacap. Oracle have a relationship with Brainware.  Kofax and ReadSoft are independent of any one ECM vendor.   Microsoft are not linked with any particular capture vendor, and several vendors have worked on plug-ins to integrate capture software with SharePoint.

MoReq 2010 is the European Union's new specification of requirements for electronic records management systems.

It is a radical departure, in both form and content, from previous versions of MoReq, and from other electronic records management specifications such as the US DoD 5015.02 standard (the latest version of which was published in 2007).

Previous electronic records management specifications aimed to specify a system that could act as the single records repository for a whole organisation,  with users being expected to save any document needed as  record into that repository.  They created the phenomenon of the 'Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS)'

The EDRMS model was dealt a severe blow by the rise of Microsoft's SharePoint, which did not attempt to meet those specifications, and which took the collaboration space away from EDRMS vendors.

MoReq 2010 was in many ways a response to the rise of SharePoint, to the persistence of multiple content repositories within organisations, and to the emergence of alternative formats to the 'document' and the 'file/folder'.

MoReq 2010 aimed to encourage a diversity of different models for records management systems - as well as the EDRMS model it was possible for the following models to be compliant with MoReq 2010

• systems that had no user interface, but which captured records saved into existing applications and repositories within the organisation
• systems that did not hold records themselves, but instead protected and managed records held in existing applications and repositories within the organisation
• line of business applications and single purpose applications that had records management functionality build into them

In this podcast Alan Pelz-Sharpe said that the enterprise content management market is a global market, and most of the big technology companies are based in the US.  For MoReq 2010 to have a big impact on those vendors, it would need to have some traction and recognition within the US. 

James Lappin felt that it would be beneficial for the records management community if MoReq 2010 became more influential than the existing US standard DoD 5015.02.   DoD 5015.02 included the specific security requirements of the defence and intelligence sector, which many organisations did not need.  MoReq 2010 had taken a different approach.  The core requirements included only those record keeping needs perceived as common to all sectors.  Any sectors with specific requirements (health sector, legal, defence etc.) would be encouraged to write plug-in modules to MoReq 2010 that organisations within those sectors could use to inform their buying decisions.

Alan wondered whether the relative lack of publicity for the launch of MoReq 2010 in the US would harm its chances of adoption in that country.

In the podcast we referred to several blogposts written about the launch of MoReq 2010 including:

• Alan's post Is MoReq 2010 a DoD 5015 slayer?,
• James's post How MoReq 2010 differs from previous electronic records management specifications
• Marc Fresko's post Shhh don't tell anyone

This podcast was recorded on 15 June 2011 via skype

James and Cheryl started by discussing the rise of open source enterprise content management systems.

They went on to discuss the impact of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standards).

CMIS is an OASIS specification, created by a group of enterprise content management system vendors (IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text and others).

CIMS enables different content repositories within an organisation to interoperate with each other even if they are written in different programming languages.  If a vendor adds a CMIS compliant layer to their application, then other applications can use CMIS protocols to perform basic content management operations on that application.

For example if an organisation installed an application that had a CMIS layer, it could allow one of its other applications to use CMIS protocols to do things such as 

• search it
• navigating around its folder structure
• add documents to it
• update documents in it  etc.

James and Cheryl discussed the progress vendors had made in adding CMIS layers to their products.

Cheryl recommended the blogs of Laurence Hart (Word of Pie) and Florent Guillaume as being good sources of comment and information on CMIS. 

Towards the end of the podcast James and Cheryl discussed the question of whether it was either possible or meaningful to make a distinction between 'documents' and 'records'.

Cheryl is the founder of Candy Strategies, and blogs at CandyStrategies.com .  She is @CherylMcKinnnon on Twitter

James is @jameslappin on twitter and blogs at thinkingrecords.co.uk

The podcast was recorded on 21 April 2011 via skype.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe and James Lappin discussed the challenge of multiple repositories on 25 March 2011.

Alan said that every organisation he had worked with had their content (documents/records etc.) spread across numerous different repositories.

These repositories had typically grown up as the organisation had merged or acquired other organisations, and/or as they had added new systems for specific lines of business.

At the recent Info 360 trade show lots of people had come up to Alan to ask him what they could do about the problems caused by the multiple repository issue.

James said that the two obvious approaches were to either:

• consolidate content into one repository (Alan dubbed this 'the uber repository')  OR

• run a federated search across all repositories

Alan was sceptical as to the feasibility of either  approach.  

Migrating all content into one repository was almost impossible because:

• content is structured differently in each repository
• metadata is captured differently in each repository
• some of the repositories will be tailored to support specific processes and it would not be possible to tailor the 'uber-repository' to support all of those different processes.

Running a federated search over each repository is no panacea either.  Lets assume you have connected the search engine to the various different repositories.  Your search engine now has the problem of understanding the way each repository keeps metadata.  And even it managed to understand the metadata in each repository, it still has the challenge of normalising across the various repositories, so it could rank and present one set of coherent search results from them all.  Alan thought you could make federated search work over three or four content repositories, but most of the organisations that he had advised had way more than four content repositories.

Near the end of the podcast we discussed the prospects for a challenger to SharePoint's market dominance emerging.

This podcast was recorded via Skype on 25 March 2011