Recently, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 sales have already exceeded the $1 Billion mark. The arrival of SharePoint is generating a great deal of excitement over what the promise holds. What makes this excitement interesting is that it seems SharePoint MOSS is viewed to be different things to different groups ranging anywhere from a portal, collaboration platform, enterprise content management or even as replacement for a shared server environment. On the surface, this makes it look like the final solution to co-founding issue of how to bring order to unstructured data repositories and corporate websites.
Parallel with this interest in considering this solution as a plug to this wide range of corporate ills is an equally widening comparison of this product to a broad range of existing platform products. Within the EMC Documentum suite of products, one offering that is often garnering quite a bit of direct comparison to SharePoint is EMC eRoom. The great irony is that not only would a head to head comparison be unfair to both products, it might make better send to compare SharePoint to EMC Documentum than EMC eRoom. But even that gets complicated quickly where EMC Documentum is a battle tested, long proven product that serves a wide variety of industries while SharePoint though it its third incarnation lacks much of the flexibility that make EMC Documentum the choice for many industries.
If one was to still consider a comparison of SharePoint to EMC Documentum eRoom, that is further complicated by the fact that the comparison would be to a moving target. Current EMC Documentum product roadmaps points to a scenario where version 6.5 could very well be a last chapter that creates a harmoniously synergy of collaboration and enterprise content management such that one can’t so easily discern where old eRoom ends and EMC Documentum starts.
Therefore, the best one can even attempt is a comparison of EMC Documentum eRoom version 8 or earlier vis-à-vis Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. As might be expected, there a quite a few things that clearly shows eRoom’s maturity and discernable strength. On the reverse side, especially considering EMC Documentum version 6.5 is not here yet, there are many things that SharePoint offers that simply might not available yet.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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I agree that Documentum has done a great job vs. Sharepoint in coming up with updated portal solutions based on real problems & needed flexability. It's hard to talk to Microsoft sometimes...with robotic emails coming back to you and all.
They're not the only one. I consulted for a company once switching to a CMS solution called Centralpoint. So there's a small company in Cleveland that's competing with Vignette and Sharepoint. I have come to realize that in the software market there are those who profit on the complexity of things and people that profit on the streamlining of things. Take a look at them if you are doing another comparison on CMS / Migration from Sharepoint. I think that you will be as amazed as I was.
I've been doing this for about 10 years now, and it's goofy when you think of the HUGE budget that Microsoft has vs. this little company...just what you get. Also, the pricing on Centralpoint allowed the client to afford my services & to actually make a living vs. outsourcing at 2 bucks a day...talking to Tom via VOIP.
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