Forrester ECM Suites Wave 2009

Forrester just published their 2009 ECM Suites Wave. Forrester notes that Oracle Content Management is "a compelling option for many enterprises, especially those seeking to leverage investments in other Oracle applications." Oracle has licensed this for download, so have a look on us and enjoy.

Accounts Payable: Three Pathways to Efficiency

My colleague Jason Lamon just got his article published in Infonomics "Accounts Payable: Three Pathways to Efficiency." Jason has many years of expertise in document capture and imaging, and his article has a lot of depth in the details of how organizations can automate their processes.

1. Back-end Document Capture and Archive
While this level does not automate the process, it provides a solid base of content so that your processes are not disturbed if paper is lost. It also provides a good look up process when you need to refer back to an invoice - a lot better than going to the warehouse and dusting off some old boxes.

2.Front-End Document Capture and Data Entry
In this process, invoices are scanned and then routed for data entry. This still requires the manual process of data entry, but enables electronic review, which is much faster.

3. Front-End Capture and Workflow
This level provides full-blown workflow to route the processing and approvals. One additional area that can be included is document recognition and OCR, which can even automate the data entry process.

Jason also offers some guidelines for organizations to decide which level of automation they are a candidate for. It's a great read. You can follow Jason on Twitter @jasonlamon.

Putting Documents Into Business Processes

Most organizations agree that a lot of time is wasted looking for documents. In the webinar I did with Jim Pearce of Tallgrass Technologies last week (I'll post more about this later), his customer Missouri Division of Professional Registration, reduced costs associated with lost or misplaced documents by 92%. And one of the keys to these kinds of productivity gains is having the information in electronic format, and having it accessible from right inside the business processes.

On the heels of the Enterprise Application Documents announcement at Oracle OpenWorld ’09, Oracle is offering two webcasts that further explore the process improvements and ROI achieved by integrating Oracle Content Management with enterprise applications. The first webinar, titled “Quick and Easy Access to HR Documents,” shows how organizations can create an enterprise-wide document repository, decrease costs and cycle times of HR processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve PeopleSoft implementations by putting document and image access right into the PeopleSoft application window, where people need them.

The second webinar is titled “Transform E-Business Suite Processes with Integrated Document Management.” This webinar shows how by tightly integrating Oracle Content Management and Oracle E-Business Suite organizations can streamline operations, decrease cycle times, and reduce document storage and shipping costs, removing paper from high-volume transaction processes.

These two webinars complete the series that began this summer demonstrating Oracle Content Management integrations with Siebel Call Center and Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing modules. From a single enterprise-wide document repository, organizations can search across content while enabling access to documents right in the business processes where they are needed.

Keeping Content Management Funded

How do you ensure your content management projects are funded at your organization? How do you ensure that your corporate leadership has visibility into your projects to protect them when times are tight?

I've just uploaded four videos that show the AIIM Keynote Panel. Top executives from four firms discuss how they keep their management aware and keep their projects vital. These four segments have been often quoted since they were recorded, in publications such as Fortune Online, but now you can see them in their entirety.

AIIM Keynote Panel Part 1
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 2
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 3
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 4

These clips are from the AIIM Conference Keynote Panel on the first day of AIIM 2009. In these videos:

• Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco discusses how she encouraged her executives to fund a new WCM project when they were not able to find their highest selling product on the web, or how to connect a prospect with a sales person
• Mike McKuras of BlueCross/BlueShield of Minnesota talks about how they looked at ECM as one giant project with a $24M price tag, and instead assign an ECM expert to every project to make sure that it is incorporated into the planning
• Todd Januzzi of Vornado Realty Trust speaks of how their content management has had a direct impact on their bottom line by making them better able to respond to document requests for real estate sales, and by freeing up office space by converting paper documents to electronic
  
• Lt. Col. JD Whitlock of U.S. Air Force Medical speaks about how they have made their content more accessible, improving the quality of the content and making their people more productive.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment and tell me if these were useful, or what you would like to see presented next year - we are in the midst of choosing our topic and speakers.

Enterprise Application Documents

Last week at Oracle OpenWorld ’09 we announced Enterprise Application Documents. Though we have been connecting content management to applications for a while now, the integrations have gotten so much better, and so much more strategic that we felt we needed to wrap them in a name and highlight them.

• The user can see assets they can choose from for their campaign. A Siebel sales user can see the sales proposals they have sent to their customer from the customer record.
• The integrations are certified with apps unlimited – PeopleSoft, Siebel, E-Business Suite and JD Edwards – Enterprise Application Documents works with all of these products today.
• Enterprise Application Documents is also the strategic content management system for Oracle’s Fusion Applications.
• Enterprise Application Documents enables migration between application versions and will also enable the migration to Fusion Applications. We’ve already had a number of customers throw out other content management systems, implement Oracle Content Management, and then upgrade their applications and see that, based on how our integration is written, their content moves forward with their new application version.

For end users, Enterprise Application Documents has some important ramifications:

• Users can search across application siloes. Like my previous post about Dave Hyzy from Benderson, with Oracle Content Management you can set up virtualized views of content for each audience. If your organization has E-Business Suite for AP processing, and PeopleSoft Campus Center for student on-boarding, you can setup different metadata for each use case. But for people who need to search both systems at the same time, the virtual siloes can be ignored (since is it is really one repository that is being used).
• Non-apps users can review and edit documents. If you are using Siebel Sales, and create a proposal for a customer, you probably want to run it past legal before you send it to your customer. If legal does not have a Siebel license, how can they see the document to review it? With Oracle Content Management, anyone in the organization who is authorized can review content, or even edit it.
• The documents are subject to content management. More than just a place to store documents, Oracle Content Management provides a truly enterprise-strength content management system. Users can find previous versions of a document, the documents are subject to records management, and can be placed on a hold, content is de-duplicated. All the benefits of content management are included.

As examples of Enterprise Application Documents, we have two webinars we did back in July. The first showed Oracle Content Management integrated with Siebel Call Centers. The second showed Oracle Content Management integrated with Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing.

We’ve got a couple more coming up in November – HR for PeopleSoft and Asset Management for E-Business Suite. I’ll post the links when the invites are up.

So Long OOW 09!

Last day of OOW 09, I'm in the Middleware Lounge, editing some video I took and uploading it, and answering the many questions about our Middleware in the Cloud story with Amazon. Lots of people are just trying to figure it all out - so I'm going to post a copy of the slides I used for signage in the lounge on SlideShare - many people had requested copies. These slides talk about what the cloud is, what Amazon offers, and how Oracle Fusion Middleware can be used in the cloud.

What we have been showing this week is some of the Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs, that the team has put together. When you sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), you get access to these images, which include SOA and WebCenter configuration. No need to install and configure, you just login and you can start developing. Want to share it with others? No problem. Worried about your laptop frying and losing your work? No problem. Do you move between different machines for work and at home? No problem. Because it's all held online, you have many more options for how you work with your projects.

I also uploaded a video of Billy Cripe describing his experience with Amazon Web Services. It was all good until he closed his instance without saving his changes, but he was able to recover a snapshot, so it worked out. There are more presentations at 11:30 and 2:30, and if you come by and drop your business card you get a $35 credit from Amazon - which, at 10 cents an hour gives you 350 hours of development time.

Enable the Eco Enterprise Award Winners

Congratulations to Enable the Eco Enterprise award winners Missouri Division of Professional Registration and their implementation partner Tallgrass Technologies. MDPR reduced paper consumption by 50% through the use of document imaging, scanning, and distributed capture:

• Eliminated 22,000,000 pages per year of copy costs
• Eliminated 90% of mailing, shipping, and other delivery costs associated with issuing licenses and related certifications
• Made an 85% improvement in document retrieval times
• Secured online storage at the State Data Center

Now they can provide electronic methods to submit license applications and supporting documents, including fax, web and email capture. They have secured the content and created indexing and metadata conventions to ensure quick and easy access while maintaining 99% uptime.

The results are

• 894 tons of paper saved
• 1,789 tons of trees saved
• 14,706,300 gallons of water saved
• 1,735,254 pounds of solid waste eliminated
• 53,640 pounds of emission gases eliminated
• License issuance went from average of 3 weeks to 2 days
• Reduced average time searching for documents from 2 hours per employee to 26 minutes
• Reduced copier cost by 62%
• Reduced associated filing cost by 76%
• Eliminated or reassigned 7 positions
• Reduced costs associated with lost or misplaced documents by 92%

Congratulations!

Customer Awards Event

We had our customer appreciation event last night, sponsored by Fujitsu. Great food, drinks, and networking. Our customer award winners were:

Open Enterprise - Eaton - Steve Gannett
User Experience - The JM Smucker Company - Becky Gurecky and Kim McMullen
Digital Warehouse Award - Costco Wholesale Corporation - Bob Razminas
Distrbuted ECM Award - Embry Riddle Aeronautical University - Cindy Bixler

Thanks Fujitsu for sponsoring this event.

Smuckers

Andy Larsen, SA Technologies and Robert Esquivel, Fujitsu

Real World Customer ROI of ECM

Michelle Huff and I have a session today entitled Real World Customer ROI of ECM (4 PM, Marriott Hotel, Salon 9. In it we will refer to a few pages and I wanted to put the links here:
City of Ottawa TEI study
Emerson Process TEI study
Oracle Green Calculator

Virtual Siloes for Applications

New video posted this morning - Dave Hyzy of Benderson. Some interesting points he makes:

• Virtual siloes for integrating with applications – content is specific to those applications and users (metadata, for instance), so Benderson manages those as virtual siloes. But IT admins it as one system, and other users have visibility across enterprise to find documents.


• Index validation against JD Edwards – as they index their documents, the values are compared to their JD Edwards application data for validation.


• Going electronic gives them simulatneous mulit-user access and processing of documents. Before, when they were paper-based, unless they made photocopies, only one transaction could be processed or reviewed at a time.


• Disaster recovery in multiple places - they can archive digital copies in multiple places, which gives them true disaster recovery.

Cloud Computing and Middleware Lounge

If you are going to Oracle OpenWorld 09, learn about Cloud Computing and middleware development at the Middleware Lounge. Get a hands-on experience of developing Oracle Fusion Middleware in the Amazon Virtual Development Environment, with follow-along demonstrations daily at 11:30 and 2 PM (2:15 on Wednesday, 2:30 on Thursday). The Fusion Middleware Lounge is a great place to recharge your phone or laptop, network, and watch live twitter feeds of conference comments. Lower level of the Marriott, at the end of the Yerba Buena foyer, open Monday through Thursday during show hours.

Oracle at AIIM Roadshow in NYC

Next week, Tuesday September 29th, we'll be taking part in the AIIM Roadshow in Manhattan. If you are local to NYC come by and see us. Luke McQueen (yeah, that's really his name!) will be presenting a session titled "Get Better Control With Best in Breed Oracle Applications Integration and Web Content Management." You can get more details here.

Oracle The Leader in Gartner MQ

Oracle Content Management was recently chosen as the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. What’s interesting is that Gartner takes a broader view of Web Content Management as a comprehensive platform. Besides having best in class web content management, Oracle Content Management is integrated to the products that organizations use as part of their web platform. Companies that use Siebel or RTD for campaigns and offer metrics want to have their assets managed in a system that is integrated to those campaigns and decision engines.

The other thing they are looking at is a comprehensive content management platform that will not only rock your website, but will provide a solid system for your intranet, and on top of that enable you to address file store optimization, governance, and other issues that we think are vital.

To see the press release and the link to the report, click here.

Siebel for Sales/Siebel for Marketing and Loyalty Webinars

Another web seminar tomorrow - this one focused on Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing users.

Speaking to some of the attendees of the last webinar, we're finding that we are really striking a nerve. Services folks have been looking for ways to attach service agreements and other customer correspondence directly to the customer record in Siebel, ensuring that call center folks have fast access to these documents.

Similarly, Siebel Sales users want to be able to attach customer and prospect correspondence such as sales proposals directly to the customer record. The system also automatically creates a PDF version of the proposal that the sales person can send out. This makes sales people more productive, so they can focus on selling instead of spending their time finding documents, managing them, and converting them for distribution.

And in the case of marketing teams, Oracle Content Management is integrated with Siebel Marketing and Loyalty to enable marketing users to attach assets such as images and web pages directly to campaigns. The assets can be automatically routed for approval, ensuring that only the most up-to-date and approved assets get published with your offers. The end result is you can reuse assets, reduce duplicate efforts, and even automate approval processes for marketing content - getting your message to market faster and improving your marketing agility.

Oracle ECM for Siebel

Web seminar this morning showing how Siebel Call Center users can associate managed documents such as warranties and service agreements with specific customer records. Nice if you've ever had a problem finding these kinds of documents, or if you want to associate certain documents across a group of accounts.

There will be another webinar next week showing how Oracle Content Management integrates with Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing and Loyalty.

Billy Cripe - Best Paper Award

I am BLOWN AWAY that Billy Cripe won Sessions Best Paper Award for the Information Systems Technologies and Applications Session at the 13th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Dude, you totally rock!

AIIM Infonomics Issue on Green

Lots of great content in the new Infonomics issue regarding the green benefits of content management.

• Green ECM - The Real Deal
• Going Green to Get Green
• New Impetus for Going Paperless

I'm really excited to see this taking off.

COLLABORATE 09

Since my last entry the COLLABORATE conference has come and gone. It was great to see a ton of customers and partners. We had the opportunity to shoot three customer video interviews – Dave Hyzy of Benderson, Margaret Ebner of NV Energy, and Cindy Bixler of Embry Riddle. Those are getting edited now and should be up on the Oracle website soon.

We had an awesome party on Tuesday night hosted by partners Fishbowl, Frontline Logic, Keste, and Elastic Path. Special kudos to Jen Marzolf of Fishbowl for spearheading the effort – it was a great time and a flawless event (until the rain started, but that was just nature’s way of saying it was time to stop partying!).

The Oracle Content Management SIG did a tremendous job setting this event up – from scheduling the sessions to promotions to scanning the visitors. Al Hoof, Dave Chaffee, Mike Barton, and Mark Heinsdelman put in a lot of time and effort and it all paid off as the event was well organized. They did such a great job that the IOUG is using them as an example for the other SIGs on how to organize.

Also, special kudos to Frontline Logic. Brent Seaman’s team earned an amazing perfect score on the Vendor Rating scorecard, which was filled out by exhibits visitors. Well done guys!

COLLABORATE is a meeting of the Oracle User Groups and a great chance to get all the details on Oracle product implementation. Next year it is scheduled to take place in Las Vegas April 18-22nd. Hopefully some of the things that take place in Vegas will make it back to our customers’ offices!

ARMA Tri-Chapter Meeting

I spoke at the Bay Area ARMA Tri-Chapter meeting today (Silicon Valley, Golden Gate, Mt. Diablo). My slides are on slideshare. One stumper question – how do I decide what a record is when the content is getting constantly updated? Hmmm… If it’s getting constantly updated, is it a record, or is it collaborative content? If there is a published outcome, is that then the record? And is the collaborative content something you would retain to help you remember how you arrived at that outcome, and then discard at some future time? I’d be interested in hearing YOUR thoughts on this.

If I sum up the three major points of my presentation:

1. The skill set of records managers is needed more broadly across an organization to ensure good retention management of all content (unstructured and structured). While lots of people are focused on the right side of the EDRM model, programs still need to come back to reducing the amount of content being retained.
2. The owner of various applications are not the owners of the application data
3. In making your software selection, make sure you understand your organization’s goals for your records management program – are you trying to lower risk, lower costs, provide better visibility to content (and therefore better arming your legal counsel)?

I look forward to getting more involved with the local chapters.

AIIM 2009 Recap

AIIM served to raise the profile of Oracle as a leader in content management – noting that competitors such as IBM and OpenText were not visible on the show floor nor in the keynote sessions. Attendees also saw Oracle’s presence in airport signs, bus stop signs, cab tops, and on the key cards to their hotels.

Our opening day keynote panel, hosted by Bob Shimp. Bob led four of our customers through a lively discussion of how to maintain visibility for content management projects at your organization. This panel was a touchstone of the show, as it was quoted in a number of other sessions (including two mentions by Dan Woods of Evolved Media) and articles (see links below).

Huge thanks to Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco, Mike McKuras of BCBS MN, Lt. Col. JD Whitlock of USAF MSC, and Todd Januzzi of Vornado Realty Trust. You guys really made a compelling conversation.

See the InfoTrends interview on the show floor with Greg Crider, Sr. Director of Product Marketing.

The Oracle booth had demo stations for Universal Content Management, Imaging and Process Management, Oracle Compliance Solutions (Universal Records Management, Information Rights Management, and Universal Online Archive), WebCenter, Beehive, and Secure Enterprise Search. Six Oracle partners also demonstrated as part of the Oracle Partner Pavilion: Fishbowl, Brainware, Fujitsu, Enterpulse, ScreenScraper, and MuseGlobal.

Joely Urton set up analyst meetings for Oracle executives, and for a number of our partners and customers, which was an added bonus to their trips.


A couple of mentions of the keynote:

Channel Web Magazine quotes Lt. Col. James Whitlock as saying E2O is “a source of exchanging important information across various lines of business and hierarchies.”

FierceContent: The Recession Casts a Long Shadow Over AIIM 2009 relates the story Molly Wenzler told about how she developed executive support at MeadWestvaco: She sat the executives down at a computer, had them search for information on the company's best selling product. When they couldn’t find it, she had raised the urgency of her WCM project and secured funding and support.

AIIM Conference Next Week

Next week we will be at the AIIM Conference and Expo in Philadelphia. For the opening keynotes (Tuesday March 31 8:45 AM), we will run a panel of four customer executives talking about how to communicate the value of ECM to your organization. Our session is right after the opening keynote and right before John Mancini’s State of the Industry address. I’ve been through the questions with each of the speakers on the phone, and they all have very interesting and unique perspectives, so I expect this to be a fascinating conversation.

We’ll have Oracle logos at the airport, on cab tops, and in bus stops, and we will be in booth 710, with a mini-theater full of informative sessions such as how to manage multi-lingual websites, 5 Ways to Build Your ROI with Oracle Content Management, and How to Integrate Your Content Management and Records Management Strategies. We also have a number of partners in the attached partner pavilion. Out of the partner pavilion, Brainware and Fishbowl will also be presenting in the mini-theater. We also have two presentations in the applications showcase, Supercharge Your Applications With Content Management and Go Green, Save Green with Oracle Content Management.

We also have four customers presenting. Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco, and David Roe of IronWorks, will present on the MeadWestvaco implementation in a session titled “5 Rules to Optimize Your Website for SEO, ROI, and New Site Creation.” (Tuesday 2:30 PM)

Tom Chaffee of BCBS MN will present Encouraging and Sustaining a Common ECM Vision (Thursday 10:10 am)

Jim McKenney will present City of Kent Consolidates Information to Provide Constituents with One Reliable Source of Information (Wednesday at 4:45 pm)

Jen Marzolf of Fishbowl Solutions will present 6 Week WCM Implementation At Ogelthorpe Power (Thursday 10:10 AM)

I’ll try and do some updates from the event – no promises!

AIIM Green ECM Microsite

AIIM has posted their new Green ECM microsite. It's wonderful to look at, oh, and look at that, it's sponsored by Oracle. Lots of great information including an invitation to the AIIM Web Seminar I'll be doing with Forrester on April 15.

We have a day and a half green event here at Oracle kicking off tomorrow where we will look at all of the Oracle green programs from the product groups.

Green Panel Webinar

We had our green panel webinar last week – with Cindy Bixler, CIO of Embry Riddle, Nancy Richards, Principal of Business Arts Management, and John Klein, VP of Business Development at Midland Information Resources. John talked about how, in their implementation at Emerson Process Management, they saved over $500,000 in paper consumption. Cindy talked about how Embry Riddle used to ship paper everywhere – back and forth from headquarters to their 170 campus locations. Having information scanned and checked in, making it instantly available from any location, saved them tens of thousands of dollars in courier and shipping costs. Nancy talked about how at Swedish Medical, the two systems she implemented moved them from paper to electronic, saving them tons of money but also improving the patient experience. In the cases of each of the customers profiled – Embry Riddle, Swedish Medical, Emerson Process Management, and Standard Forwarding – they talked about the process improvements each company experienced, and how it saved them money and made them more competitive. But beyond the process improvements, where the bulk of the ROI was realized, the paper-based benefits also brought the green benefits of reducing paper consumption, shipping costs, and other green benefits such as reducing warehouse and office space, reducing employee commutes and the associated environmental impact, and enabling better compliance and disaster recovery planning.

We of course talked about the Oracle Green Calculator, which enables customers to input their paper based ROI, and see the resulting impact on the environment, in terms of number of trees saved, barrels of oil saved, and pounds of carbon emissions avoided.
You can access the calculator here: www.oracle.com/goto/ecmgreen
You can hear the replay of the session here: www.oracle.com/goto/thrive

ASIO – Green Data Centers
ASIO is a green data center working off of energy they generate. Their roof has 120 solar panels, running the servers, lights, and a water-based cooling system. The water for the cooling system is collected on site from rain runoff. The systems only use 2 gallons of water per hour, and 50% of the water is recycled and used again for cooling. ASIO also uses virtualization that nets them at 60/70:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers. Most data centers claim they are green by buying energy produced from green sources. ASIO conserves energy and creates their own, moving towards a zero environmental impact. A vision of the future. www.asio.net

MeadWestvaco - Thriving Through Foreign Market Expansion

As part of our Survive and Thrive series, we had MeadWestvaco, and their consulting partner Ironworks, present today on how they are using Oracle Content Management to manage their main site, and a number of microsites.

Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco talked about how the website had been a series of unrelated, unmanaged sites, and how if you would search for their best-selling product it wouldn’t even show up in the search results. David Roe of Ironworks talked about how they spent more time planning the underlying architecture of the site than implementing it. The time spent in the architecture phase really paid off - they stood up the first site in 3-4 months, and now they are able to stand up sites almost instantly. Molly set up a job site in Russian in just a few days, for instance.

Besides the main site, they showed the China site, and the Branding site. The branding site is for employees to find PowerPoint templates, images, logos, etc. They store one copy of the images, but users have the ability to select what rendering parameters they would like the image in (size, resolution, file type) and the Digital Asset Management module of Universal Content Management dynamically renders the image for them.

Now they are able to track site visitors, and their path through the content, to the point where they request a contact or a sample. Molly is really focused on site loyalty – how many pages people view per visit, and returning visitors. And through workflow they are beginning to track those visits all the way through to sales. Molly is using that data to track the ROI of the site. Molly has also put a lot of focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). She points to one $3 million sale that started as a Google search, which led the prospect to their site.

Besides the framework setup, David has pushed really hard on having useful content attributes. The attributes, or metadata values, when combined with the Service Oriented Architecture of Universal Content Management, makes it easy to recast data in many ways. This really shows well in the product site, where products are presented by category, by industry, and by material properties. And by using Dependent Choice Lists, David makes it very easy for people to drill down to specific content types.

David has been blown away by the performance. He said that they have never had the site go over their target response time of 1.5 seconds, and they average sub-second response. To us, this is what we have come to expect from Oracle Content Management, and this type of response indicates that David understands how to properly architect the product. We’re really impressed with his grasp of the system and his ability to execute.

And Molly’s understanding of content management systems, and website goals and measurements, is making for some great uses of our technology.

David’s blog is here: http://contentoncontentmanagement.com/
You can hear the replay here: www.oracle.com/goto/thrive

AIIM SharePoint Webinar

If you missed the webinar, you can still hear a recording of it.

Great questions from the crowd, and a record setting attendance. The survey was interesting in terms of the qualification of respondents. Carl invited 1000 people to respond. 616 unique organizations responded. Carl then lobbed off companies smaller than 100 people, which brought the number down to 512. Then he dropped anyone who was not in production which he defined as having both business group and IT blessing for the implementation.

Carl mentioned that he gets about a dozen pings a day from organizations looking for SharePoint talent. He attributes this to the high demand for the product, but also the fact that integration is not easy and training is not readily available.

Of the organizations that gave up their implementations, 48% stated their chief concerns were security and integration. And if you can’t secure and integrate your content management system, it’s really not much more than a file share.

SharePoint - Truth and Fiction

Oracle is sponsoring an AIIM webinar titled "SharePoint – Truth and Fiction." In a recent AIIM study, over 400 organizations shared their opinions and experiences concerning Microsoft SharePoint. So what did we find? Well, as you would expect, SharePoint works well for file sharing. And it works OK for employee facing websites. But it is rarely used for WCM, DAM, Records Management, BPM/Complex workflow, etc. Also, organizations are finding that it costs way more than expected as a platform for development of custom solutions.

I think what is interesting about that is the comparison of Microsoft’s positioning versus reality. They have pushed SharePoint as an ECM solution that can do anything. But the reality is that when you push it to do more than the basics, insanity ensues.

It certainly is an area of interest however – over 2,000 people have signed up for this webcast, which blows away any previous record for an AIIM webcast.

The event takes place Jan. 28 | 2:00 pm EST / 11:00 am PST, and a recording will be available afterward.

To check it out, sign up here: http://www.aiim.org/Events/Webinar-Microsoft-Sharepoint-1-28-09.aspx

Customer Success With Oracle Enterprise Portals

Oracle has just announced a portal webcast series entitled “Increase Success and Reduce Costs with Oracle Enterprise Portals.” This series, like the Survive or Thrive content management series, will be a great chance to hear customers talk about the challenges they have faced, decisions they have made, and the results they have attained by implementing their portal strategies.

The first in the series is titled “Success Through Communities: How McKesson and Oracle Drive Tighter Customer Relationships through Portal Technology.” McKesson will talk about how they enable rapid 'communities' deployment and 'experience definitions,' helping them respond more rapidly to customer interests. Thursday, January 29th, 11:00 a.m. PST
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=6642147&Act=97&pcode=NAMK08041030MPP049

The next in the series is titled “Success Through Customizations: How South Florida Water Management District and Oracle Keep the Largest Environmental Project on Track with Portal Technology” This agency is the leading agency in restoring America's Everglades – the largest environmental project in the nation's history. Thursday, February 5th, 11:00 a.m. PST
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=6642147&Act=98&pcode=NAMK08041030MPP052

On Feburary 25, the session will be “Success through Consolidation: How Embry-Riddle Simplifies Access to Information and Services with Oracle Portal Technology.” And the last in the series will be “Success Through Migrations: How Alibris Adopted an Innovative Portal Platform Using Oracle WebLogic Portal Framework,” and will take place on Tuesday, March 10, 2009.