EMC and Microsoft Form New Enterprise Content Management Alliance, Extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Server With Content, Compliance and Archive Solutions

Very good announcement today. EMC and Microsoft form a new alliance in the ECM field. This and the other partners in ECM(Interworven,Filenet/IBM, Hummingbird, Open Text) combined are a powerful major statement about Microsoft’s intentions and position in Enterprise Content Management. If someone is still questioning Microsoft’s platform, the role of SharePoint Server and the partner eco system, think again …

HOPKINTON, Mass., and REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 3, 2006 — EMC Corporation and Microsoft Corp. today announced a new enterprise content management (ECM) alliance aimed at helping to enable organizations to become People-Ready with their compliance, regulatory and other critical business data. This alliance enables information workers to take advantage of the Microsoft® tools and applications they use every day to access and contribute to the critical business processes available in their ECM infrastructure. As part of this strategic alliance, EMC will introduce a set of new content and archiving products that enable tighter integration between the industry-leading EMC Documentum ECM platform and Microsoft solutions and platform technologies. This announcement builds on the existing EMC and Microsoft alliance. (The previous announcement about their relationship is available at http://www.emc.com/news/emc_releases/showRelease.jsp?id=4095).

EMC will bring to market new solutions that seamlessly integrate the EMC Documentum platform with multiple Microsoft solutions and platform technologies including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, SQL Server™ 2005 and enterprise search solutions. Microsoft provides content management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007 today. With this new alliance SharePoint users can take advantage of the advanced ECM capabilities of the Documentum platform. Information workers will be able to access the Documentum platform natively from within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office system, enabling users to leverage the power of the Documentum platform in areas such as advanced records management, business process management, imaging and rich media from their preferred Microsoft applications.

“In response to demand from our mutual customers, Microsoft and EMC are working together to help enable customers to take advantage of the ECM capabilities across Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the EMC Documentum technologies,” said Kurt DelBene, vice president of the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. “By expanding on the rich integration between Documentum and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, we are offering customers more choice and control over the management of their business information.”

“For years, customers have been demanding seamless integration of their working environments with enterprise-level content management capabilities such as content classification, retention, workflow and security,” said Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice president and general manager of Content Management & Archiving at EMC Corporation. “Today’s announcement makes this integration possible and is yet another milestone in EMC and Microsoft’s collaborative efforts to deliver enterprise-class solutions that address customers’ most critical business information requirements.”

“At Dow Corning, we’re a large EMC Documentum customer with approximately 150 content management applications across our organization and a premier Microsoft customer,” said Ann-Marie Horcher, senior specialist at Dow Corning Corp. “We’re pleased to see EMC working closely with Microsoft to integrate its content management capabilities directly into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We believe this is the right strategic direction, as the success of content management is ultimately determined by our end users’ ability to access the content and capabilities necessary to meet their business needs using familiar applications.” …

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