Yesterday’s acquisition of Day Software by Adobe should not come as a surprise. For those watching closely over the last seven years, Adobe has been trying to build their own Enterprise Content Management system. Some would argue with little success. What does come as a surprise is when. In a time where the validity of [...]
No, I haven’t converted into a SharePoint fanboi. I am merely acknowledging that it is here to stay, at least for two more versions. Realizing that, my company has been doing quite a bit of SharePoint work in the past few years. We have recently been looking at SP2010 and just upgraded a customer to the new version.
This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area. I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.
I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people. For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion. We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.
There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation. I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.
There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes. Feel free to drop questions.
These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation. I am providing them here for easy reference.
Good luck.
Check out my guest post on the case management vs. content management debate on the Fierce Content Management site. Another post on this topic comning soon title: “Just what is a case anyway?”
SharePoint is a complex product with a complex pricing model. In an attempt to try to clear things up, I talked to Microsoft’s Subsidiary Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint, Åren Ekelund about how much SharePoint 2010 will cost in a web content management scenario.
Products such as Windows, Office and SharePoint are typically bundled, the different products have different license models and prices depend on your organisation’s license agreement with Microsoft. Customers can always contact a Licensing Specialist to figure out how much they actually pay for their Microsoft solutions. For web managers however, it can still be a challenge to figure out how big a part WCM is of the total bill. This is also the case for the recently released SharePoint 2010.
As with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), many believe they have the licenses already as a part of their existing license agreement. If your organisation has a so-called Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, Client Access Licenses (CALs) to SharePoint are indeed included. This means that internal users have access to SharePoint.
However, when it comes to web content management, you will have to buy additional licenses for the external facing servers. These vary widely in price depending on many factors, but here a few realistic indications:
These prices are one-time expenses which you need to pay up-front for each server. If you choose to get an optional – but recommended by Microsoft – Software Assurance (SA), you will have to pay around 25% annually of the initial license price. Most significantly an SA will allow you to upgrade to new versions as they come out.
Note that many organisations will need several servers if they have significant web requirements (e.g. 2 front-end servers and a search server). UK SharePoint expert Ari Bakker has made some useful pricing examples for SharePoint 2010, which illustrate how much it will cost in both internal end external scenarios. As an example, Bakker writes that a large website on SharePoint with FAST search would cost EUR 82.000 (for 2 Enterprise servers and a FAST search server).
The best advice from Microsoft is to talk to your existing license partner in order to figure out how much your SharePoint projects will cost. Microsoft themselves will also be happy to answer any questions on pricing. As Åren said:
“SharePoint 2010 pricing can be hard to explain, but actual price quotes are easy to get via Microsoft or a licensing partner. We are always happy to help”
My advice is to contact Microsoft early on in any large project, before you decide on one system or license model over another. Many have burnt their fingers on SharePoint having thought that they didn’t need additional licenses. As a comparison, licenses for other .NET based systems such as Ektron, EPiServer and Sitecore start around EUR 30.000 – 40.000 for enterprise projects (see our CMS shortlist from 2009). So even if you have an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft including SharePoint CALs, SharePoint might not be the cheapest option, if your WCM requirements are significant.
Thanks to Søren Laurits Nielsen, Kristoffer Munch, Niels Højdahl (@hoejdahl), Shawn Shell (@shawnshell) & Åren Ekelund for constructive input.
Sharepoint 2010 has just been released and everyone is excited about the possibilities and the unique advantage it can lend to their business. Specifically, there has been a lot of talk about Sharepoint’s new web content management capabilities. A lot of folks are wondering if they could possibly use the new Sharepoint release as the technology stack to maintain both their enterprise collaboration needs and their corporate website. In this article, we will review the new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit your organization’s strategic website objectives at this time.
Let’s begin our discussions by reviewing, at a very high level, what specific business problems Sharepoint was meant to solve.
Microsoft designed Sharepoint as a collaboration platform to address specific business needs, such as – Collaboration, Secure Portals, Data Integration, Document Management, Records Management, Search & Discovery…
Further to this, the platform offers robust APIs, which allow extension of the base platform to third party solutions that address specific business needs for corporations in the mid to enterprise markets.
Sharepoint is generally viewed in the market as an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) platform with enriched web editing capabilities. It has inbuilt support for collaboration, back office integration, secure role based access, workflows & business process automation, document indexing, search & discovery capabilities. Most of all it offers some capacity for consistent branding and layouts across the organization.
New Release of Award-Winning SharePoint Administration Product Features Support for the Latest SharePoint Platform
WOBURN, MA– June 1, 2010 – Axceler,the leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today introduced release 4.0 of ControlPoint, the award-winning administration product for SharePoint and winner of the Best of Tech-Ed 2009 awards. The new release 4.0 supports SharePoint 2010, demonstrating the company’s continued industry leadership in SharePoint administration and staying ahead of the needs of SharePoint administrators. The new features in ControlPoint 4.0 were designed to improve administration of SharePoint 2007 and bring the same advanced capabilities and more to the SharePoint 2010 platform.
ControlPoint, the leading SharePoint administration product for Microsoft SharePoint and winner of the most recent Best SharePoint Product award, includes comprehensive permissions management, in-depth activity and storage analysis and the ability to measure performance of SharePoint environments against governance policies. Axceler ControlPoint also gives administrators complete control over the configuration and deployment of their SharePoint environments.
ControlPoint 4.0 will be available this month, fulfilling Axceler’s commitment to releasing a SharePoint 2010 version of ControlPoint within 60 days of Microsoft’s RTM of the new platform.
I had a mission at Momentum this year that I had to perform for some of my eRoom clients. I had to determine the viability of CenterStage as a replacement for eRoom. Two facts answered my question:
CenterStage 1.1 is scheduled for GA in Q4. Calendars are a year away.
Really? Where have I heard that before?
After I learned the above facts, I made the following announcement on Twitter:
Everyone take a moment to mourn the passing of #eRoom & #Documentum as a collaboration tool provider.
Needless to say, it turned some heads. There is one good spin…the release date for 1.1 hasn’t shifted, it is still Q4. Just don’t ask which Q4. It is like the developer that keeps telling the PM that they will be done in 2 weeks.
There is no way I can look my eRoom clients in the eye and tell them that they should wait for CenterStage if they want to launch a new initiative. Even if I believe in the roadmap, why should they believe in it? Given the focus on Case Management, how can we even be sure that the CenterStage will continue to receive the proper funds and staffing to meet all the goals.
Two years ago, CenterStage was awesome and was heralded as the replacement for eRoom. Here we are, two years later, and we don’t have data tables and calendars yet. We are still on version 1.0, though we did get a service pack in there.
Why did this happen? They were probably a little aggressive two years ago, but still, there had to be some continuing issues with implementing the features in the Documentum repositories object model in a manner that was efficient.
I bet all those architectural problems could have been solved with xDB. Just a guess.
So what to do now? While CenterStage is separated from the platform, as it should, the product isn’t being innovated like it should be as part of a more focused development team.
As far as I am concerned, EMC is currently not a provider of collaboration solutions.
Meanwhile, did anyone notice a little announcement from Redmond on May 12? Apparently there is an earth-shattering, world-saving, product out from Microsoft. You may have heard of it, SharePoint 2010.
Last I checked, EMC has some decent products that work with SharePoint. One has been out for over a year and already works with SharePoint 2010, the poorly named “EMC Documentum Repository Services for Microsoft SharePoint”. For the rest of this post, we are going to call it Dave.
Dave is pretty good. It allows you to put the power of Documentum behind SharePoint. Dave has a few functional weaknesses, but it is ahead of all the other competitors in regards to capabilities and the larger ones are being addressed.
Seems to me that SharePoint may be a good collaboration tool to use with Documentum.
Of course there are the headaches of managing two infrastructures and all of that storage. Now if only Dave could work by talking to a Documentum instance in the public cloud. Man, that would make my life easy and make Dave an easy sell to customers.
Well, there are two good things to come from all of this:
Webtop is on a perpetual lifetime contract with EMC, but I can see CenterStage in place to replace it and become their default cloud interface.
I figure given the current focus, CenterStage should be mature around the same time the Content Server is ready for the cloud.
The only question is if I’ll have retired by then.
Capgemini presented an interesting topic on SharePoint and Documentum, focusing on when to use each. I was attending another session at the time, but Chris Campbell has once again shared his notes with us.
Topics
Only one person attending session was using only SharePoint as a repository.
| Document Management | Collaboration | WCM | Records Management | Social Media | Image Capture | DAM | Correspondence Admin | Biz Process | |
| SP 2007 | Enterprise | Ent | Basic | Basic | |||||
| SP 2010 | Enterprise | Ent | Ent | Ent | Ent | ||||
| EMC | Enterprise | Ent | Ent | Ent | Basic | Ent | Ent | Ent | Ent |
Repository functionality view
EMC covers the full ECM repository stack
MS focuses on certain ECM functionality takes a little ground with each release
MS will likely never offer full repository functionality; it’s not their focus
Hybrid solutions are required for full ECM repository functionality
SP lacks federated records mgmt.., enterprise archival, renditional mgmt., image mgmt. correspondence mgmt., process mgmt.
SP full with document mgmt. “quickflow workflow”, enterprise records mgmt., enterprise scale* with caveat
Usability
Compliance
CM Integration
Operational
Ability to manage SP data sources
Comprehensive archiving of SharePoint content
Policy management
| SP 2010 | Hybrid | EMC |
| No EMC storage | Mixed storage | EMC storage environment |
| Smaller overall repository < 100 GB | Larger overall repository > 100 GB | Need for massive file volume scale 5 TB and up |
| Basic workflow requirements | EMC Documentum deployed | Complex records management |
| Web content management and document management needs only | An enterprise file plan defining many records types | Complex records and management requirements |
| All of my unstructured content is in a single repository ready for migration | Multiple systems containing content defined as a record | Complex document level security |
| No requirements to map unstructured content growth to a hierarchical storage plan | Mixture of collaboration and process focused business apps | Complex process focused business applications |
| Collaboration focused business | Mixture of ad-hoc and compliance oriented content | Many regulatory agencies to satisfy |
| Need for digital asset management, storage management archival management | Large scale imaging requirements | |
| Heavy hierarchical storage and archival management requirements |
SP 2010 Records Center can be an enterprise solution for records/retention management, but there are serious challenges:
Three main points to consider:
For more on this presentation, read Andrew Chapman’s blog post on the session.
All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.
All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.
Lance Shaw is going to present on the Documentum clients. Last night, I was told repeatedly to come to this session to learn more about the non-Case Management. I was actually coming anyway, but let’s see what happens.
Love Lance, fun guy and entertaining. Not much new since last year, except many of the products are either now out or almost out. Last year, they were heavy in the limited release black hole.
Search Server is next, after some caffeine.
All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.
All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.
This is the third and final post in the Problem With “E” in ECM Series. In the first I outlined why “E” representing enterprise has lost its meaning and usefulness when discussing content management in all its flavors. In the second installment I discussed how SharePoint has captured the ECM market as we knew it. In the [...]