My first EBC presentation
My buddy, Munish Agarwal, asked me to sit in on an EBC (that’s Executive Briefing Center) session this past Tuesday, October 4th, for which the topic was “Office System Futures.” I’ve organized and attended numerous EBC customer briefings over the years, but this was the very first time that I would be there as a “Product Group Guy.” And what better way to do it than for my buddy’s customer!
I had expected to help with some Q&A, but I ended up actually presenting and fielding questions for about 30 minutes on the topic of Enterprise Content Management. I was a bit nervous, not so much about the content because I had ramped up on it the night before, but because Kurt DelBene, Corporate VP of Office Server Group, was there. Fortunately, I had met and chatted with Kurt briefly the week before at an afternoon BBQ and beer fest to celebrate SharePoint Portal Server 2003’s success in the marketplace and its achieving the “Leader” Quadrant in Gartner’s May 2005 Report on portal products, so I wasn’t overwhelmingly nervous. Anyway, I told the audience a few things that I thought I should share here:
- Office “12” Servers will make a big impact in the ECM space because we’ve taken a holistic approach by integrating document management, workflow, policy and compliance, and web content management features into a unified, enterprise-class solution. Apparently, some people have noticed. Most of our competitors offer point (which they may call “best of breed”) solutions or add-ons that are costly to purchase, difficult to implement, and not well integrated with the tools – the Office client apps -- that most people use to create content.
- Companies, such as Interwoven and Open Text, which had been fierce competitors of Microsoft (and in some ways, they still are), recently announced support for Office 12’s ECM capabilities not because they were afraid of us (at least I don’t think so), but because Office 12, particularly the server side of Office 12, will be a very rich platform on which to build business solutions. Personally, I’m expecting the ISV ecosystem for Office “12” Servers to grow very significantly over the past 12-18 months.
- When considering solutions for strategic business challenges such as improving organizational effectiveness and reducing information management risks, be wary of vendors that have a multitude of products (like a dozen or more) under a brand umbrella because very few of them are tightly integrated (otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many separate products). Also, you should aggressively scrutinize every solution for which the vendor charges you more to deploy than the software licensing cost. Lastly, be sure that you’re paying for just the software and not perpetual consulting services fees.
