By now you know that Microsoft SharePoint has a 3-year development cycle. Three years is not a long time for highly process-oriented functionality, like many types of document management applications. However, a long development cycle is a significant shortcoming in areas like Collaboration/Social and Web Content Management, where Redmond's circa-2009 codebase feels increasingly out of step

It's a discussion that reoccurs regularly enough with Real Story Group Document Management (ECM) subscribers -- how do I get skilled ECM staff? It's a tough question to answer

In our recent 20.1 release of the WCM Report, we’ve updated evaluations of several CMS vendors in the .NET arena, including DotNetNuke, Ektron, Kentico, SharePoint. The mid-market product tier is a bit like the crowded Grand Central station:

We've said this before on this blog, in various ways. But sometimes, the simple analogies seem to work the best: if you think of SharePoint, think of it as a Swiss Army Knife. That sounds great, doesn't it? It's like the multi-tool of content technologies. Imagine a major vendor and integrators turning up at dinner to explain how great their Swiss Army Knife is for any purpose, and yes, it's excellent to carve your food with, too. Why go with just a knife, if you can have a whole range of additional functionality in one system?

Last week we released a significant update to our comparative Web Content Management vendor reviews. There's a lot to conclude here about what's going on in the marketplace, but for now, I'll just summarize some of the new info from our revised evaluations

Capture + workflow = ECM.

It's a simple formula that works most of the time in enterprise environments. It works for the simple reason that most electronic documents that require organizational attention typically are captured and proceed down a structured workflow

I have been attending and speaking at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York this week, a good conference with many opportunities to rub shoulders and pick the brains of smart folk. But it's also an event that gives me a sense of deja-vu, since so little appears to change in the world of search. In fact I am fairly convinced that I could pull out a presentation from a decade back, brush off the dust, and present it with a straight face today

In any content management system -- web content management (WCM), document management (DM) or digital asset management (DAM) -- how content gets persisted is an important aspect of the overall content lifecycle

As a technology customer, sometimes you should worry less that a software vendor is blowing smoke, and perhaps a bit more that the vendor's consulting partners may be leading you down the garden path. Some consultants bank their entire job -- or even their whole career -- on a specific product, and will sometimes defend it to the last

Today I was thinking about search tools -- and adjacent topics such as content/business analytics -- and all the different situations that today's enterprise search engines find themselves involved in

As I've noted on this blog many times before, a lot of Google Search Appliance's "features" are actually outside-of-the-box, rather than out-of-the-box. That can present an unpleasant surprise to many Google customers. But ironically, it's also a great advantage to anyone who wants to use

As always, the specific answer depends on your particular requirements. Nevertheless, based on our customer research and recent product CMS selection experience, we can generalize that SharePoint remains poorly suited for most external web publishing environments

In the early days of Web Content Management, many customers tried to employ the same technology -- and often the same physical infrastructure -- for publishing both their intranet and public websites. During most of the past decade, the trend has been to separate these efforts

Last week we published an advisory paper for our ECM subscribers that analyzes some of the key challenges and limitations of using SharePoint's native services for Records Management (RM).  The briefing focuses on the standard configurations supplied by Microsoft, outside of third-party software options. Here's the outline

I led a session at last week's Info360 event in Washington DC called "ECM & BI - a Shotgun Marriage."  I was unsure about it from the get-go, as my fear was that I would spend 45 minutes essentially making a single point: that these two things are largely incompatible. What actually transpired was a bit more interesting