How & why would ECM / Document Management software product companies primarily leverage MOSS 2007 (sharepoint) in their product suite?
Along with Integration of their product with MOSS to add new features, new applications and reach a broader base of enterprise users; what else would be the primary drivers to leverage MOSS in their products from their end user perspective?
Answers (3)
Rakesh V
Director, Prosares Solutions (prosares.com) - Sharepoint | Business Intelligence | ASP.Net
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Dhruva,
The underlying architecture of sharepoint is really excellent and allows sites based on this technology to be highly scalable. Add a host of integration advantages vis-a-vis ADFS, Office, WWF, ...and you have a really attractive proposition - probably with no parallel. Moreover, MOSS has rich search, personalization and BI capabilities.
Rakesh
www.prosares.com
Dhruva,
There are a couple of ways to look at this- all from related but independent perspectives :
If the aim is to leverage ECM for knowledge managament - creation, storage, colaboration- MOSS 07 packs a splendid punch. It allows quite a few critical web 20 operations with minimum fuss including Real time presence and collab, wikis, blogs, community web parts, predefined templates, an awesomely refeatured calendar and gropus/lists. These makes online collab a breeze. hence ultimately ensures better KM. End users would really benifit from the community/collab angle of KM and doc creation.
From a document management PoV, the doc collab features can be leveraged well in an ECM product. Multiple content support, workflow, audit, versioning, tree view, offline doc library etc. These features/design makes admin, access and librray functions easy for the end user. An ECM product can easily finetune on these designs to suit specifics.
Lest I forget Search. This really must have got Steve B's goat coz MSFT went all out on this. :-) The UX is so so, the algo,i don't have an ieda abt and the search results would do with some Rethink but where it scores is it's ability to handle multiple file types and also extend the set of possible searchable extension. Think of having an oulook, Lotus and even SAP and searching seamlessly ! Loads of enterprise would give their left thumb for accessing Line of business data and MOSS can handle this well. I see that as a cool sales trigger for MOSS based ECM and something that would add good value to the end user. And oh, you could also do a ppl sarch based on expertise.
Similar advantages sit on the BI, Process/ Forms, Portal angles but I think the clincher would be the M in MOSS. It simply makes it worth the investment if you see the amount of cross leverage you can gain on a MS office Suite. Neat integration with Outlook, Excel, Forms, Powerpoint , Word and I can spend my office hours without getting out of a MOSS based portal. So, It is an easy sell for a product developed on MOSS because you can always convince the buyer that it will unlock synergies in their enterprise investments by giving bang for the buck on the desktop.
Hope that helps. Afraid, it sounds too 'go MSFT !' but at least MOSS works smoother than Vista.
Hi Dhruva,
Best answer is indeed reaching a broader base of enterprise users, currently MOSS is every IT managers worst nightmare as every business manager can now easiliy set up their own DM/ Collaboration/Portal/Knowledge sharing.. etc. environment.
Besides the fact that it is Microsoft and thus everywhere around us, MOSS offers far greater usability than your average ECM suite. ECM suites are typically tailored for "heavy users", althought of course functionality can be left out. However, usability has only recently become an issue for ECM vendors, while Microsoft has been at this for a somewhat longer time (whether succesfull, influential or monopolistic, I don't want to go into that discussion).
So I would say MOSS adds a lot of user-friendliness to your ECM environment.
