The Value of Partners in Microsoft’s ECM Ecosystem

Q&A: How Microsoft and some of its industry-leading partners are delivering on enterprise content management (ECM) solutions for their customers.

… “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a strategic imperative for most organizations as businesses are seeing a huge explosion of structured and unstructured information that includes documents, e-mail messages, voicemail and video. There is a tremendous opportunity for technology to step up and provide a cohesive system for managing these valuable corporate assets. However, to date, that potential has yet to be realized. Currently, most organizations spend a great deal of time and energy rolling out an ECM solution and strategy, only to discover that its adoption throughout the organization is very low, due both to siloed implementations and to low usage, even in departments where ECM solutions have been deployed.

Microsoft has a different approach: What’s interesting about ECM is not just ECM as it stands alone in managing your content but how it fits into your overall strategy for managing processes and information, both structured and unstructured. If you look at the investments we’re making with the 2007 Microsoft Office System, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn,” the focus is on how the ECM market helps accelerate the management of information and processes. More than 80percent of the content created is in the unstructured space in an organization. Microsoft and its industry partners are helping enable people to create, manage and distribute content, as well as make business decisions efficiently and effectively. We’re enabling people-ready organizations.

With the upcoming release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which provides a broad set of ECM capabilities on a unified platform based on the widely adopted Office/SharePoint foundation, Microsoft reduces the overhead of ECM. The new technology enables information workers to participate in their company’s ECM strategy using desktop tools that are already familiar to them, such as Microsoft Office and SharePoint technologies.

However, while committed to delivering a comprehensive set of ECM capabilities out of the box, Microsoft understands that every industry and organization has unique needs. Thus, Microsoft supports an ecosystem of partners (system integrators) and ISVs, who bring their specific business experiences and products to create and sell solutions, complete solution components, fill in solution areas in the ECM product stack, and provide vertical expertise.” ….