John Shackleton, the CEO of ECM vendor Open Text, today quashed rumors of an impending acquisition by Microsoft, according to the Toronto Star.

In a recent article in Infoconomy, I argued that Microsoft and Oracle's enterprise content management strategies represent two sides of the same ECM coin.

Enterprise search is steadily finding its way to the desktop.

Both IBM and Microsoft are investing heavily in major new releases to their content management and portal product offerings due out next year.

Say what you will about Microsoft CMS (MCMS). I have criticized the company in the past and possess misgivings about what the next rev of the software means for current customers.

Among the buzz at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference came demos of RSS and Workflow infrastructure built into the forthcoming Vista operating system.

Records management and compliance is one of the dullest topics on the planet, yet as I never tire of saying, it's important!

I say quietly, because the announcement of Oracle Collaboration 10g seems almost timid compared to the noisy but unfortunate promise of a tsunami when the product was foreshadowed last year.

I recently reviewed open-source ECM project Alfresco in a short KMWorld article.

According to CRN, a Microsoft executive, Chris Capossela, publicly confirmed what Redmond has been telling channel partners for some time: that MCMS will get folded into Sharepoint under the new Office 12 roll-out scheduled for the end of 2006.

Enterprise Search vendor Coveo has launched a Sharepoint edition of its search product.

Interwoven has announced plans for tighter integration between it's Worksite DM and collaboration tool and the Microsoft stack, including MS Office and SharePoint.

You might have to wait a bit longer for the much-awaited next version of Microsoft CMS (still quaintly known as MCMS 2002) according to resellers quoted in CRN.

We have reported growing unease among Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) licensees about the future of the product.

When Oracle launches an ECM offering you have to take note, although the company has a history of talking more about content management than delivering.