As Informed Consulting we believe in the individual employee that needs to be connected to the enterprise.
The individual has become important and will increasingly become more important.
Today employees are a mixture of people that grew up without PC’s and people for whom always on-line is like breathing: you can’t do without.
Our live has changed. Our expectations of the organisations have changed. Bring your own device. Choose your own tool.
From the needs of the enterprise this looks completely different.
Control. Compliance. Structure. Successful ECM solutions typically meet these two needs roughly halfway.
Meeting both needs halfway needs more than just the good old Documentum Content Server and Webtop. We see the combination of SharePoint and Documentum — connected through SDF — as a common solution.
But what if — right or wrong — the customer doesn’t want SharePoint in their IT landscape? Is D2 a product that could fill that gap? Can we SharePointize D2?
Yesterday was election day in the USA so the applicable answer is: Yes we can!
But like these elections, it’s a close call.
More importantly, it depends on the context of your collaboration.
If it is just document handling and providing ‘info’ widgets next to it, there is a significant overlap between SharePoint and D2. Later, when D2 will add full 2–way communication in the widgets, it will even get closer.
If your collaboration is also around discussions, contact lists, meeting agenda’s, and all those (sort of) content-less objects, it becomes a different story.
The question then becomes: will you create all those missing features somehow in a Documentum back-end? I think — although technically possible — you shouldn’t. Once you have a hammer, not everything is a nail.
To avoid this pitfall, you must think carefully before you act. Ideally, even before you choose the solution!
D2 to some extend reminds me of the late 80’s with interfaces on top of databases.
We’ve come a long way since and learned some lessons.
One is to do your application analyses very well. Get all requirements. Make your use cases. Do your interaction designs. Then choose your solution.