And Before You Upgrade, Reread Your Contracts

What you find might surprise you. A fine investigative column in InfoWorld describes one company's futile effort to cancel a software maintenance agreement with L-Soft. An obscure provision striped across two separate documents quietly locked the customer into a longer maintenance agreement than they wanted. L-Soft revealingly pointed out that it fully expected customer lawyers to use a sharp razor to dig out and slice away such offending clauses -- despite the fact that such legal counsel could well cost more than the unwanted maintenance fee. This is an unfair game, because the ISVs usually need to pay the lawyer only once, but each customer counters from scratch. BTW, some of the biggest victims, in our experience, are government agencies...
Check out "Sharpened Clause"

Other ECM & Cloud File Sharing posts

ECM Standards in Perspective

In real life I don't see ECM standards proving particularly meaningful, and you should see them as a relative benefit rather than absolute must-have.