Management Update: Powerhouse Vendors Implement Document Management

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1 IGG G. Landers, K. Shegda, D. Logan Article 30 October 2002 Management Update: Powerhouse Vendors Implement Document Management Interest within enterprises is growing in the management of unstructured content. Integrated document management is no longer a stand-alone market. The latest market trends involve content management offerings from powerhouse vendors. Interest within enterprises is growing in the management of unstructured content. Moreover, integrated document management is no longer a stand-alone market. The latest market trends involve content management offerings from powerhouse vendors. IDM: A Market in Transition Integrated document management (IDM) is in transition. Comprehensive content management is a vision that some vendors have for fulfilling all of an enterprise s content requirements, including imaging, IDM, workflow, integrated document archive and retrieval system, digital asset management, records management and Web content management. The enterprise content management approach is a strategic direction being espoused by vendors such as FileNET and Documentum. Potential benefits from this one vendor fits all approach are lower training and IT administrative costs, seamless access to all forms of content, increase in content repurposing and reuse. Entrance of Powerhouse Vendors Once the exclusive domain of specialist software vendors, such as FileNET and Documentum, the management of unstructured content has captured the attention of powerhouse vendors such as IBM/Lotus, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. Those powerhouse vendors present a compelling proposition, promising a lower cost of ownership, additional leverage of expensive software investments and a natural synergy with an enterprise s established architecture. Most importantly, they hope to address a growing need that enterprises have to manage their unstructured content to ensure ease of access, lower costs, productivity gains, feed and even outsource business processes, along with the promise to dam the information flood that so many enterprises are experiencing. As a 25-year-old application space, document management has many proven benefits, which have been extensively documented in Gartner research. A well-planned and judiciously implemented IDM Gartner Entire contents 2002 Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 system can save an enterprise time and money, as well as enable new business models that will enhance revenue growth. A well-designed document management system can also serve as a platform for future knowledge management efforts. IDM Product Functionality The basic functionality that Gartner expects in an IDM product is: Library services (check-in/check-out, version control and document-level security) Desktop browser access Repository search capability Support for all popular text file formats Workflow Central user administration capability Scalable and robust architecture to handle thousands of users and millions of documents A separate metadata repository Stand-alone functionality broad access from outside the SAP environment Can the powerhouse vendors deliver these benefits with content management capabilities that compare to the more-established specialist vendors, and can they do it at a comparable cost? Powerhouse Vendors Document Management Capabilities IBM Domino.Doc IBM/Lotus provides two offerings to address enterprises IDM needs: IBM Content Manager and Lotus Domino.Doc. Domino.Doc is a collaborative document management product built on the IBM Lotus Domino platform. With Domino.Doc, Lotus Software takes a life cycle approach to document management by addressing authoring, review and approval, distribution, consumption, archiving, discovery and reuse. Domino.Doc leverages Notes and Domino s collaborative capabilities, security and replication features and adds incremental functionality to the Notes/Domino foundation. It has typically been more of a horizontal collaborative document management tool, serving as a foundation for knowledge discovery and management. IBM Content Manager is primarily used as a platform for production document imaging. In addition, it contains core IDM library services, as well as digital asset management support for rich media files. Domino.doc should offer tighter integration with IBM Content Manager. To be considered a leader in IDM, IBM/Lotus must add pieces such as native records management and compound document

3 management capabilities to its applications. IBM is at the head of powerhouse vendors IDM offerings. Domino.doc is a mature offering with a large following and makes sense for enterprises with a Lotus architecture. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Microsoft s focus in the IDM market is on knowledge worker productivity. Its strategy is to integrate document management into the portal as a means of improving knowledge worker productivity within the Microsoft Office and Windows environments. At its simplest, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is primarily a document-centric portal product that can aggregate content from multiple sources and present it through a single access point. It addresses the immediate need of desktop users and knowledge workers for document management and information retrieval capabilities within the Windows 2000 and Microsoft Office environments. In its favor, SharePoint offers ease of use, out-of-the-box deployment and strong search capabilities. SharePoint is a single-server solution, meaning that all the content and associated metadata can only be stored on one server. Because of this, there are serious concerns about its scalability. The result has been that enterprises are approaching the adoption of SharePoint with trepidation. Microsoft must address this issue in the next release. Integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Content Management Server is a natural evolution. Oracle Internet File System and Oracle Files Although Oracle provides Web-based collaborative services with the Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Application Server, it has not gained presence in the document management space. Oracle does not have a comprehensive, packaged software offering for content management. Rather, its software for content management is a collection of tools and products that form a framework on which Oracle developers can build content management applications. The Oracle9i database can be used as a content repository. Oracle s Internet File System provides storage of files in the Oracle database with which it is typically packaged. Access is allowed from the Windows File Explorer and protocols such as FTP, POP3 and HTTP. Oracle Files is basic rudimentary document management and part of the Oracle Collaboration Suite. It provides the basic core library services: check-in/check-out, version control, document-level security, and search and retrieval. Like Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, it aims for just good enough capability. In its favor, it takes advantage of the scalability of the Oracle database and comes with a toolkit for customization. It comes with a parser for mapping to an XML schema and enables extraction of that data to the database. In this respect, it goes beyond most second-tier IDM product offerings. However, it does not support optical character recognition, imaging or workflow, typically backbone services included with IDM systems. Oracle has a separate workflow offering, Oracle Workflow. Oracle Files is more a file system than a full-fledged IDM product. SAP Document Management

4 SAP has offered document management as part of R/3 since It has never been a serious contender when compared to full-featured IDM products, and the market has not paid much attention to it. Recently, however, Gartner has received a number of calls about this module, with clients asking if they should consider it as part of a document management strategy. Most often, those questions come from engineering workgroups that find they need document management capabilities to control technical drawings and technical documentation. Gartner does not believe that the document management module is a good alternative to the fullfeatured IDM suites, such as those available from FileNET, Documentum, Open Text, Hummingbird and others. The features and functionality are not comparable. Deployment for SAP Document Management beyond the SAP environment is difficult. Enterprises may choose a different document management product to address those needs. Enterprises that use the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) module of R/3 should consider the document management capabilities accessible through the R/3 interface. Those investing in mysap should consider using the content management capabilities for creating content and pushing it to the portal. More robust document management or content management features will not be available in the short term. Enterprises should consider alternatives from the stand-alone vendors. It is appropriate to use the SAP PLM Document Management module in an SAP-centric productengineering environment, where licensed seat holders use the mysap PLM as part of their daily work. mysap PLM is a product life-cycle management product, aimed at designers and product engineers who use relatively complex processes to design relatively complex products. The offering is a well-integrated set of functions, which suits the types of products that start life as computeraided design drawings, need to have bills of materials associated with them and have associated technical documentation. The marketing strategy is to make an offering to SAP customers, allowing them to leverage their investments in SAP, which is an appealing prospect in times of tight IT budgets. The offering is complementary to SAP and works well in SAP-centric environments. It is an integrated way to keep track of all the data and document-based information associated with product development. When working in the mysap PLM environment, SAP Document Management should be the first document management product that is considered, if no broader enterprise document management needs exist. SAP Document Management is most suitable for product engineering and product marketing groups. mysap Enterprise Portal Through the Enterprise Portal, SAP provides a content repository and services, including taxonomy creation and classification. SAP acknowledges that it isn t necessarily trying to take over the content repository that is, to be the central repository for the enterprise but it can, if customers want that. More importantly, it will work well with other document management repositories. It has built (through the Repository Framework) capabilities similar to what Venetica does and what others (for example, IBM, Vignette and Day) are attempting to do bidirectional virtual repository capabilities. SAP offers basic Web content management functionality as part of SAP Portals. The functionality is sufficient to provide business users with easier Web content authoring in a structured way through the use of XML-based templates and XSLT rendering tools. Publishing-focused workflow tools are

5 provided, as are search tools and the option to use third-party search tools. Core functionality, such as check-in/check-out, versioning, access control and taxonomy tools, are provided. Although this is competitive functionality with average Web content management offerings, it is not intended to compete as a stand-alone product in that market. SAP is correct in this product positioning, because the Web content management market is consolidating, and competing here would mean competing against another major player, Microsoft. Instead, SAP s goal is to offer good enough Web content publishing and management functionality to SAP customers. For customers with extensive content management requirements, SAP has numerous partnerships with vendors in the Web content management space. Indeed, as Web content management matures and consolidates, the Web content management vendors must look at opportunities to content enable the major enterprise applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft. Bottom Line The powerhouse vendors IDM offerings are incomplete and have limitations. The offerings from IBM and Microsoft are a natural first checkpoint for enterprises without extensive document management requirements that are seeking to leverage their technology investments to the fullest. The use of the SAP and Oracle offerings should at least be considered in the current economic climate. Written by Edward Younker, Research Products Analytical sources: Garth Landers, Karen Shegda and Debra Logan, Gartner Research For related Inside Gartner articles, see: Management Update: The 2002 Integrated Document Management Magic Quadrant, 24 July 2002 Management Update: What You Should Know About Enterprise Content Management, 24 July 2002 Management Update: By 2005, Microsoft Will Be a Leader in Web Content Management, 24 April 2002