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Word of Oracle's step up into enterprise content management (ECM) leaked out two months ago, but ECM shoppers and competitors were still anxious to hear the details on the product, which has yet to be formally announced this week here at Oracle Open World.
Oracle's stab at ECM, which is due out early next year, will be packaged as an upgrade to the company's Collaboration Suite, which has gained more than 2,000 corporate customers and "several million" seat licenses in the last two years, according to the company. The product is highlighted by more comprehensive and robust document management, workflow and records management capabilities, yet it doesn't complete the list of features and functions often associated with ECM suites.
Specifically, Oracle has beefed up the product's content security and access control model, added provisions for content classification and extended its search and query functions. Workflow has been enhanced to support both event- and policy-driven processes, and events, policies and foldering schemes can be used to declare records automatically, with optional manual verification.
"We won't put the burden on the user," says Rich Buchheim, Oracle's senior director of product management " ECM strategy. "From the user's perspective it's not different than using a desktop application or file server. Through a combination of foldering, events, policies and classification techniques, content can be indexed as it's brought into the system without users having to do anything."
Corporations and users are looking for less cost and complexity for most content management needs, Buchheim contends. "When companies want to bring content management out to 70 percent to 80 percent of their users, they want something that's scalable and cost effective," he explains. "Most of the activities they need to support are collaborative -- bringing together general knowledge workers and managing content such as marketing materials, draft contracts and ordinary Microsoft Word documents."
ECM vendors including Interwoven, which acquired the iManage collaborative document management product more than a year ago, have been critical of Oracle's foray into ECM, describing it as another "too-little, too-late" attempt to move beyond the database market. "There's a graveyard of failed Oracle extensions into new markets, whether it's CRM, application servers or portals," said John Bara, senior vice president of marketing. "We don't see them as a near-term threat because the true value in ECM is in creating value for vertical and departmental applications. Oracle still has a lot to prove in that regard."
At IBM, which claims some 20 percent of the ECM market and an active installed base of nearly 60 million seats of Lotus Notes, Ken Bisconti, vice president of Workplace, portal and collaboration products at Lotus, asserted that Collaboration Suite is "largely used as a simple e-mail backend, and not much more." In the area of collaborative content management, the upgrade will compete with the IBM Workplace portfolio, which Bisconti contends offers a "more comprehensive and [WebSphere Portal] integrated user environment" including Web content management and a managed client software delivery model not offered by Oracle.
The Collaboration Suite upgrade is not a complete ECM suite including compound document management, Web content management or digital asset management. Compound document management addresses complex, componentized documents used in product documentation, drug test submissions, complex contracts or product lifecycle management. Web site and digital asset management capabilities are limited to basic intranet interfaces and Web-based file sharing.
Oracle's new product was dubbed by one analyst as "Sharepoint on Steroids," and Buchheim acknowledged that Oracle is aiming at the same low-cost, every-seat deployment model that has helped Microsoft gain 25 million Sharepoint users in little more than three years. The product is midway between Sharepoint and the high-end ECM suites, says Buchheim.
Particularly for Oracle shops, the ECM upgrade is a nice fit that has a lot to offer. It's not as capable (nor as costly) as high-end ECM packages. It's more scalable and capable than Sharepoint, but it's not a free bundle with a low-cost portal interface, as is the Microsoft product. In short, it's the very definition of middle of the road.