Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: Transparent ECM and SOA

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Transparent ECM and SOA

Laurence Hart comments on the need for increased transparency and how ECM and SOA should converge...

My fear, as a Documentum practitioner, is simple. What if Documentum becomes all about the platform and neglects the client components?

The server side of many ECM platforms still leave a lot to be desired. I agree with Laurence is terms of the importance of continuous improvement for client APIs but wonder which is more important?

Oracle’s Billy Cripe writes that many users would be perfectly happy having their ECM platform supporting their other applications. However, sometimes that takes work. An ECM SOA standard may help with that, but right now, there is still benefit to be had by having Content Applications that are business problem focused.

Yes, all good architectures take work and ECM vendors shouldn't be so hesitant to do a little bit. Have they heard of the notion of merciless refactoring? Maybe we can talk about why ECM vendors understaff their development teams as a separate discussion.

Records Management, Collaboration, Web Content Management, and others center around content, and it makes sense to have versions of those applications that can tightly integrate with an ECM platform

Jesse Wilkins is a big proponent of records management and has mentioned concepts such as IDARS and products such as Alchemy. I wonder what features does Alchemy have that is missing from Stellent and Documentum?

Here is the Catch-22. We need an ECM platform that can easily be plugged into an Enterprise Architecture. On the other hand, we like having good, solid Content Applications from the same vendor. Oh, there are times we want/need to mix and match, but many organizations want to at least be able to consider the applications provided by the ECM vendor. It also shows an understanding of the problems that the ECM Platform needs to support.

I don't believe it is as much as a catch-22 as it is a trap. The issue at hand is that there are more customers that want to integrate with products NOT from the ECM vendor than there are that do. The issue is that ECM vendors have been ignoring the desires of their customers and prioritize based on insular internal interactions over talking with others in the value chain.