By Bo Warburton
Lately everybody tells me I have to get into SharePoint. SP is viral, SP can’t be stopped, nobody breathes the MSFT air. Let me tell you, if I had one Canadian dollar for every time Microsoft was going to put Open Text out of business next year, I would be writing this from my private office in the highest tower of the Sleeping Beauty castle. And I would not have taken the stairs. I would have gone to work in my private helicopter. But OT and Livelink* are still around. There are three reasons for this: people buy the capital E, Livelink works good, and you can’t trust Microsoft.
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| Castle Neuschwanstein |
The E in ECM stands for Enterprise, and that means capital expenditure, or capex. Trust me on this: the people with millions to spend, like to spend their millions on capex. This is because of the annoying, irrational, yet persistent existence of a little thing I like to call the corporate income tax. When you buy Microsoft products, you are really buying a lifetime subscription to Consultant's Invoice Quarterly. You pay for this subscription out of your checking account, expense it that year, and that's it. Such a purchase, to the tax accountant, is the evil step-sister of capex, because expenses have no depreciation. Depreciation is like magic. By it, you declare that a capex is actually worth less over time, even when it is an ECM system that is really worth more (cf Web 2.0). This feat reduces your income tax. Therefore, no matter how good the alternatives are, E capital ECM will always please the bean counters who rule the world.
And yet, how good are those alternatives, really? They include not only the SP poison apple, but also open source software like Nuxeo and software-as-a-service like SpringCM. We can talk about those later, but for now, the second reason is this: ECM products like Livelink* are pretty good. For the following I owe a H/T to Marko Genzel, master engineer working in wage slavery at an undisclosed location outside the People's Republic of Chicago. He suggests we back into the question by asking, what's good about SP? It has a lot of advantages for ad hoc collaboration. You can easily set up a site and start collaborating instantly with MS Office integration. Plus you have to wonder how much OT cares any more about ad hoc, project, and document collaboration. Innovation in those areas feels half-hearted: Social Workplace is FirstClass warmed over with cheese on top, CoP is anorexic CKM, and Pulse is the new MeetingZone. Blogs and Wikis just look unfinished.
On the other hand, SP is a nightmare for IT, and IT works for the CIO (the guy with millions to spend). And Big E players are stout defenders of their home turf, such as records management: many features, smart staff, solid compliance. The gummint loves it. Another area is workflow, where the ancient engines are rock solid and other companies such as GCI and my own Supai Systems are there to kick in advanced tools, products, and know-how. The Livelink WF painter rocks, it just does. It was mandatory to show that puppy in every sales demo back in my day, and nothing has changed. (Sell the workflow, implement the library.) I could go on and on about storage, metadata, and directories, but I will simply say this. Say what you may about OScript or Docbasic, but old code is good code: the bugs are out.
Which brings me to reason #3. To (mis)quote everyone's favorite cranky old man, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, "...ask for the old ways, and walk in them, and you will have peace..." Predictability comes from stability and exists on corporate and technical levels. Sometimes the tried is true. You know what you're getting with Documentum, FileNet (Java re-write, oops), and Open Text (or is it Opentext). Despite the confusing constantly-renamed SKUs, no matter the turnover in the sales force, they will ship you a DVD, the product will install, and they won't change their strategy around Exchange public folder migration every two years. It may look the same as it did before your house doubled in value before falling by 60%, but you won't have to upgrade 3,000 workstations in order to implement an enterprise taxonomy.
I’m sticking with Open Text Content Server*. I trust the strategy and people at OT and their compadres (see my upcoming post on “the Open Text diaspora”). Their stuff works, they are focused on the right problems, and they sell in the way people buy.
* or whatever
