I caught wind of this Microsoft landing page (Office Online) via one of Forrester's blogs written by Kyle McNabb.
I'm reading the first passage and I'm thinking this is good. I'll have access to my big unwieldy ECM islands with a warm and fuzzy Sharepoint interface configured just for my department.
"..existing FileNet customers can now take advantage of the ease of use, familiar interface, and favorable price points of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to extend the benefits of ECM to every employee in their organization.."
But wait, keep reading and boom! The software wolf in sheep's clothing appears and pitches to replace your FileNET infrastructure with a discounted version of SharePoint.
"Until June 30th, 2007, Microsoft is running a promotion to offer a 25 percent discount off the regular price of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and CALs with purchase of three-year Software Assurance (SA) to FileNet customers that migrate their FileNet ECM solution to Microsoft's ECM solution."
I won't beat the dead horse when it comes to Redmond versus the other ECM vendors. Kyle describes at least one of Microsoft's characterizations well enough.
"Being good at managing business-content - project documents created in Word, financial plans created in Excel, sales presentations created in PowerPoint - doesn't automatically translate into being good in high volume transactional-content processes such as mortgage origination; new account opening; claims processing; case management; or underwriting."
Fair enough, although I'm sure there's some Microsoft solution providers who'd beg to differ. Kyle backed off a bit to close.
"To their credit, Microsoft's aligned themselves with a few vendors that understand these high volume transactional-content processes including Hyland Software, KnowledgeLake, Kofax, Captaris, and Tecmasters."
That's a respectable set of vendors but certainly not household enterprise software names. In any case, the wars between SharePoint and the incumbent ECM'ers is good for everyone..breeds competitiveness.
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