We announced Enterprise Content Management at PDC, and we've been building it for years, but I wanted to kick this conversation off by describing the landscape. Different folks have many different definitions of "What is ECM?" but inside this blog I intend to focus on a very specific set of capabilities across three big areas that form a big chunk of ECM. Rather than trying to provide comprehensive definitions of each area, I'll just name them and then provide some examples of key capabilities and highlights in that area. The idea is to give you a concrete flavor of what's going on, but it's far from exhaustive.
- Document Management: checkin/checkout, versioning, content types, document metadata, offline
- Workflow: business process for real people, review/approval, light-weight process customization, high-end workflow development
- Policy and Compliance: Records Management, expiration, IRM protection, auditing
There are definitely a lot of related areas, such as Web Content Management, Search, Collaboration --- and very interesting work is happening in those areas --- but I wanted to start a dialog around these topics that might be called "Document Services." A word of caution about the word 'document,' while many of the driving scenarios behind these capabilities are directly related to content stored in documents, the features really work across a broad variety of different types of content, including list items, web pages, email stored in WSS, etc. So if you're familiar with WSS, you definitiely shouldn't think of this as "new features just for document libraries," because most of the features span across list types with many interesting scenarios.
Before I close out this post, a quick description of "Who am I?" (Perhaps just as intriguing as "What am I talking about?" ;) I'm a Lead Program Manager within SharePoint Products and Technologies and I'm responsible for a lot of the server infrastructure behind the ECM capabilities we are delivering in the Office12 wave. One of the really exciting things about the ECM investments in this round of the Office System is that we've really involved a lot of teams in building to a shared vision for document services and document lifecycle. The end result of this is that (a) an amazing amount of work got done and (b) I have the chance to talk about work and ideas from a huge number of folks across many teams. Those folks know that they have my thanks and recognition.
One of the places where I did get to talk about this stuff was at PDC, where I got to give two sessions:
- OFF314 : Developing Enterprise Document Solutions Using Office Client and Server Solutions
- OFF318 Developing Document Archiving, Records Management, and Policy Enforcement Extensions to the Microsoft Office System
You can also catch a couple of live interviews with me at these places:
Well, that's it to get started. Feedback welcome and more to come....
-roble
(My name is Rob but most folks just call me "roble." It rhymes with "gobble".)
