Yeah, I know that the Gartner group publishes magic quadrant reports all around the year, but ‘tis the season for the Enterprise Content Management magic quadrant, and I wanted a season to celebrate in.
First of all, get your own hot and handy copy of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management here and click through to the report.
I think it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft is ever so slightly the leader on the Completeness of Vision axis, and is #4 in the race, behind IBM, EMC, Open Text, and Oracle, on the Ability to Execute axis. Nobody worries about #4, right? #1, now – they have to worry. We all know about #2 – just about as many folks chasing them… but #4? Who was #4 behind Michael Phelps in the Olympics? …never a second thought about them, right?
Let me digress just for a moment… this reminded me of an article on CMSWire last week, “Forrester: Beware of MOSS Madness?”. After the author ripped into SharePoint through the bulk of her story, she came back to the center with this comment, “The thing is, you could say that [one needs to be careful when developing for SharePoint] about just about every other CMS product out there. You just don’t hear the grumbling as loud.” Well, perhaps now that we know that SharePoint is only #4 in Ability to Execute, we won’t be hearing the grumbling that was being referred to. Or is the grumbling because SharePoint is #1 in Completeness of Vision? Perhaps the grumbling will be with us for a while yet.
I’ve got one thing to say about Ability to Execute, however. I’m not an analyst, but I am a thinker, and two areas called out by Gartner where Microsoft SharePoint is in need of partner solutions to deploy solutions are Workflow/BPM and Imaging.
Those are two weaknesses that I love to have recognized, because we have such a strong partner ecosystem in these areas. With workflow vendors such as K2, Nintex, Skelta, Ultimus, and Ascentn; and imaging vendors such as KnowledgeLake, Fujitsu, BlueThread, ClearView, Hyland, ImageSource and Captaris; SharePoint is a testament to the open framework that ISVs are attracted to as a platform for them to showcase their mad skillz. (Wow, one of those companies is also in Challengers quadrant of the ECM MQ on its own!) I wonder what happens when you take SharePoint’s #4 on the Ability to Execute axis and combine it with that incredible partner ecosystem?
…I guess it causes a lot of grumbling.
Categories: Uncategorized
The M365 Toolman 
Ultimus has been following the emergence of Microsoft SharePoint for a number of years now. With the release of MOSS 2007, Ultimus has seen more and more companies begin to invest heavily in SharePoint. Ultimus is excited to offer a multi-faceted and rich set of integration capabilities with Microsoft SharePoint that fully leverages the benefits that SharePoint technologies can provide to an organization deploying a BPM solution. Ultimus’ broad integrations are designed not only to exploit the ways in which Enterprise Content Management is most commonly used in conjunction with BPM, but also to provide the ability for users, who natively use SharePoint as application portals, to integrate with Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite client and forms.
Chris Adams
Vice President of Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus
LikeLike
Hey Owen, you nailed it! And many thanks for giving some good props to the 3rd party vendors like Captaris (my company) who placed a big bet on the MOSS open framework.
We’re providing several Capture and BPM tools for MOSS 2007, including the new TIFF iFilter Recognition Server which we’re told will enable MOSS to replace some big legacy imaging systems from many of the vendors listed in the MQ.
BR,
Dan Lucarini
Sr Director, Product Marketing and Strategy
Captaris Inc.
LikeLike
Hi,
we haven’t read the report yet, any interesting about the usage reporting of sharepoint and partner solutions ?
thanks
Uri
Intlock.
LikeLike
Hi Uri,
Seeing as how your company builds reporting for SharePoint, I find your comment about not following this research report interesting. 🙂 Taking you at your word, however, I’d suggest that you read the report that you can find at the URL in the post. Good luck with your endeavours!
Owen
LikeLike