SeeUnity a market-leading developer of end-to-end content consolidation solutions, including content integration and migration. The SeeUnity family of products focus on a SharePoint-based end user environment to address enterprise content management (ECM) challenges.
In the 1990s, the evolution of ECM offerings followed a familiar path; software vendors would differentiate by innovating unique features, such as rich media or workflow. By the 2000s, massive merger and acquisition activity took a market that started with scores of best of breed vendors, replacing them with a small handful of ECM platforms.
The result of this activity has been mixed. Companies can now turn to single vendor solutions, as opposed to supporting a complex best-of-breed model. However, this consolidation has introduced three challenge areas for ECM customers: cost, complexity, and barriers to user adoption.
As ECM vendors grow in size, so does the cost of entry. For many small to medium sized businesses, large ECM offerings have become out of reach. Recently, some vendors have tried to reverse engineer SMB solutions, with mixed success.
As the pace of consolidation increased, two main problems emerged. First, ECM vendors have not invested enough resources in properly integrating their acquired technology. As a result, vendors often complete the integration of their own products through services engagements, which are less reliable and more costly. The second problem is that through acquisition, formerly competing products may be owned by the same vendor. This can leave conflicts between customers, who prefer a certain ECM or line of business application, and vendors who are positioning a different, flagship platform.
As a result of the consolidation, product innovation at the user-end has slowed considerably. This is largely due to feature bloat, and having to continually support and update bulky thick clients. Each version of an ECM platform includes more features, many of which are uneccesary and potentially confusing to rank and file users. Each new version also requires ECM developers to update both thick-client and web-based UIs. Often, this results in either uneven functionality between desktop and web-based clients, or shelving planned improvements that could not be included on schedule with both clients. Collectively, this can result in a slowed pace of innovation, and some user frustration at poorly performing client interfaces.
From its modest beginnings as a lightweight collaboration portal in 2001, SharePoint has grown both in features and popularity, to reach over 1 billion in licenses as of 2008. SharePoint's success is due, in large part, because it addresses the challenges and frustrations caused by ECM offerings.
It's less costly; SharePoint can be deployed at the fraction of the price of an ECM platform. It's less complex; a modular architecture based on .NET framework means that functionality is substantially less convoluted than the spaghetti mash-up of ECM suites. It can also more effectively take advantage of Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and other native Microsoft offerings. It enables fast innovation; because SharePoint has always existed as a web-based client, it is not burdened with maintaining a thick client. While SharePoint is proprietary, its extensible architecture and developer community share more in common with rapidly developed open-source solutions, rather than the rigid slow-march of ECM platforms, which are now paying technical debt for trying to leapfrog innovation through acquisitions.
Specifically, SharePoint's emphasis is on providing a series of user-driven tools for creating content, and for rapidly deploying sites and pages for sharing content across a broad-base of users.
Some organizations have considered the possibility of replacing their ECM investment with the lower cost, less complex collaboration portal from Microsoft. While this has worked for some smaller companies, many enterprise organizations have found that there are several important areas where SharePoint alone cannot meet business requirements.
SharePoint is focused on empowering individual users to create and share content, without much limitation. Because of this, users are free to create sites, pages and groups at will. Users can also easily create, upload, and copy content. At an individual user level, this freedom can be beneficial, but at the enterprise level, there are potential minefields with this model.
With unchecked ability to create and duplicate content, there are two main issues. The first problem area is file space and database overhead. The accumulation of content can grow exponentially, burdening system resources and unnecessarily consuming substantial amounts of hard disk space. The second challenge is around corporate practices and managing user behavior. When users can copy and upload documents at will, without a system in place to control document versions and histories, this can create a convoluted environment, where it is difficult to control source documents and determine the history of content. This can make the user experience more difficult – consider searches for documents that return dozens of different versions of the same document, or the risks of overwriting documents. It can also impact the ability for records managers to control and preserve content as documents of record.
SharePoint offers powerful tools for crawling and search documents for content, but it lacks effective tools for creating and managing metadata. One of the advantages of most popular ECM tools is the ability to create rich keyword profiles to define and categorize content. Particularly in environments with massive amounts of content that share similar definitions (e.g. case matter documents or purchase orders), the ability to profile content (and require profiling) is critical. This profiling makes it much easier for users to filter and target searching around multiple criteria. SharePoint search performance can be moot, if users don’t have a method for refining and filtering what could otherwise be a huge list of near identical search results.
SharePoint allows for some basic user/group security that can control access for sites and documents. These tools pale in comparison to the granular security model that is part of many ECM platforms. Particularly in environments where different levels of access (read, write, manage) is defined by location, department, and role – SharePoint simply lacks the flexibility to control security at a granular level.
SharePoint currently lacks most of the tools that Records Management systems offer, including defining robust retention policies with holds, exceptions and storage lifecycles.
Despite the cost and dissatisfaction organizations may have with their ECM products, there is usually a substantial investment in infrastructure and standard user practices. A full migration to SharePoint can be considered risky. The cost of a “cold turkey” switch to SharePoint would incur massive change management costs, based on investing in administrative expertise and user retraining.
Organizations often hit a wall with how SharePoint can be deployed. The limitations, as described, often mean that companies may try to juggle SharePoint and their ECM environment in parallel. In these scenarios, “low-risk” and rapidly changing content around live projects may be created and shared with team members in a SharePoint site, while longer-term “higher-risk” content, or content with metadata/profiling requirements are managed in the ECM system.
Consider the impact of dual platforms and interfaces on users. Redundant searches may have to made, users may be less comfortable or proficient on one system, or the other. Even more troublesome is the potential for users to start using SharePoint in an attempt to circumvent the rigid, but necessary restrictions of an ECM system.
SeeUnity is addressing the gaps between SharePoint and ECM platforms with a series tools that deliver consolidation - either through client integration, content archiving and distribution, or full migration. Integration tools allow organization to continue to manage and secure content through their existing ECM resources, while embedding all of the native ECM client functionality in SharePoint's flexible and lightweight web-based UI. Archiving and Distribution solutions can mirror, link, or move content back and forth between SharePoint and ECM platforms, providing companies with the flexibility to secure documents of record in ECM archives, or to publish siloed ECM content out to a broader audience, through SharePoint. Migration tools provide organizations the ultimate control over their content environments, with the ability to securely migrate full volumes of content, metadata and permissions to a destination of choice.
With an expandable library of off-the-shelf products, SeeUnity allows organizations to take a building-block approach to content consolidation. Because of this, customers can purchase and customize solutions that meet their specific ECM needs over time. Click here to visit how SeeUnity can enable a content consolidation roadmap.