Enterprise content management has traditionally been very expensive to license, roll out and scale. It often requires expensive hardware and supporting software. The enterprise content management industry has been dependent on complexity, with the vendor controlling the customer through proprietary power. But there is a cost-effective alternative: open-source software. Web 2.0 sites have changed the way in which content is both accessed and mashed up. Here, Knowledge Center contributor John Newton explains how open-source software
gives companies an enterprise content management solution that focuses on lower cost, greater simplicity and greater customer choice.

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The past year or so IBM has been promoting the concept of "Agile ECM" in its marketing for FileNet P8. It is an interesting concept both at a marketing and implementation level regardless of whether P8 itself really fits such a label itself.

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Organizations are cognizant of the benefits of enterprise content management (ECM), but the number of compromises an organization likely will have to make to implement ECM can be daunting, according to Gartner, Inc. Picking the correct business focus is the most important first step to successful content management and information governance.

“ECM is expensive, which is why a low percentage of knowledge workers in an organization have access to ECM,” said Toby Bell,  research vice president at Gartner. “It's also too hard to justify the system for everyone based on unclear return on investment (ROI) or other success measures.”

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Watching the technology trends these days makes me sing the Old MacDonald song:  “Here a cloud, there a cloud, everywhere a cloud cloud.” Like Old MacDonald keeping track of his farm assets, every IT decision maker seems to be assessing which IT assets might be able to roost in the cloud as a way to save capital and operational expenses.

Although in its early stage cloud computing is projected as the future of computing and we are seeing a lot of efforts in this direction from all the industry giants, including Microsoft. So what exactly is “the cloud” and how can it save expenses?

Let’s take the scenario of a startup IT organization. Efficient content management and effective collaboration are among the most difficult and challenging areas for any IT organization and therefore a lot of investment goes into using technology to establish and manage these efforts. Basic components such as Internet presence, secure Intranet, email, document sharing, process workflow, etc., require complex IT Infrastructure to build and maintain. This is where cloud services become  extremely useful.

Microsoft has introduced its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) as part of the company’s Cloud Services offerings. This set of Microsoft hosted content management, collaboration, and messaging technologies includes the following services:

• SharePoint Online
• Exchange Online
• Office Live Meeting and 
• Office Communications Online.
  

These services are currently licensed on per-month / per-user basis and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) promises 99.9 percent uptime. The services are easily manageable and highly secure.

Let’s see how these different services can help our startup scenario.

SharePoint Online

• Helps us create a secure intranet environment and a central repository for managing all content across the company.
• Helps us define processes and workflows for data processing. 
• Provides a platform for hosting custom solutions/components on our company intranet.
• Provides a secure way of sharing the data outside the intranet.
  

Exchange Online

• Helps us create a central repository for storing emails, contacts and calendars. This lets employees share their contacts and calendars and also collaborate via email messaging.
  

Office Live Meeting

• Enhances collaboration by facilitating real-time conferences,events, and training sessions with customers and employees in a distributed team environment.
  

So to summarize, BPOS uses the power of the cloud and SharePoint to provide an Enterprise-class content management and collaboration environment in a very cost effective and flexible way.

So maybe there is room for the cloud down at Old McDonald’s farm.