Very short take on Microsoft’s ECM Solution in Microsoft Office System 2007 :
Microsoft is emphasizing the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features in Office 2007.
Highlights:
- Goal is to reduce the TCO and complexity of ECM.
- Document-wide search.
- Integrated rights management (especially Excel, to deal with multiple versions of the truth).
- Works across all Office applications.
- Integrated business intelligence tools, to help one make sense of data.
- Custom and out-of-the-box workflows.
- Extensible infrastructure.
- Allow users to easily collaborate, while applying top-down ECM rules.
- InfoPath 2007 is used for forms design and support. It will generate Web-based forms automatically.
Hitherto, third parties have focused on this area. With Office 2007, Microsoft is clearly validating ECM technology and saying it needs to be everywhere. Overall, this will stimulate the ECM market. It’s not yet clear whether this will be good, or bad, for established ECM vendors.
Source: blog.ferris.com
I would say this is good for established ECM vendors. Microsoft addresses a different market or at least a much broader audience (potentially all end-users). Microsoft does not intend to go into the “depth and breadth” of pureplay ECM solutions.
Update :
The list that David produced contains some inacuracies :
Integrated Rights Manangement for Excel ? Rights Management is to protect information and not to do stuff like versioning. Both functions are ofcourse also standard in Office System.
