Today Salesforce.com the hosted CRM giant announced it was entering the ECM sector, based on some Web 2.0-style collaboration software it acquired from a start-up called Koral earlier this year. It is a bold announcement that boasts the Salesforce Platform will "manage all enterprise information on demand - structured and unstructured". In fact it goes even further to state that Salesforce Content will "liberate customers from....software like EMC|Documentum..." so said charismatic CEO Marc Benioff.

This represents an important announcement, and shows how ECM is breaking free of traditional vendor boundaries, but I think it's a little early to be throwing out your Documentum installation. Nevertheless, even at first glance the product demonstrates a phenomenon that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: delivering basic library services, routing, and search capabilities, all via the web. Koral itself was quite young when Salesforce acquired it, and clearly this product set remains in its infancy. For now it's a BCS (Basic Content Services) offering of greatest interest to existing Salesforce.com customers. But it may prove an interesting taste of what's to come in the marketplace.