This week is Momentum 2012 in the European capital of the waltz: Vienna. Of course, cultural heritage is large with the music from Strauss as well as the yearly débutante ball in the Hofburg. It illustrates that the Viennese Waltz is live and kicking as part of the Vienna culture. Waltzing is a very applicable way to illustrate the way Microsoft and EMC ‘dance’ together around information management. SharePoint and Documentum have learned to move gracefully through crowds of ECM without stepping on each others tows to hard and to often.
Dancing requires one to lead, usually the male, and one to follow and shine, typically the female. It’s not that simple to say that either SharePoint or Documentum is leading or following. That is largely dependent on your starting point — more on that later — although one could say that if you take the shallow outside approach, SharePoint is the sexy partner and therefore must take the female role: follow and shine. That leaves EMC as a leader.
If you dive a little deeper, the roles are not always according to the look and feel.
On a high level you can have two starting points: collaboration versus enterprise document management.
When you start from a collaboration point of view, SharePoint will be leading, the male role, and will perform the dance for its audience. That audience is looking for flexibility, tools that they know already — that is the MS Office suite —, as well as speed of change. This would leave the EMC suite as the female role. Following and shining. Off course I too had second thoughts about EMC being shiny, being sexy.
From the enterprise point of view, there is now doubt that Documentum steps up. The male and leading role. For years we learned Documentum was not sexy. But with D2 that changed fundamentally. And yes, xCP is also a step forward. Still, for the individual collaborator, its just not always good enough. Hence their love for SharePoint. From this angle it thus is the challenge to meet the needs of the collaborators somehow. That could well be SharePoint.
But let’s face it, dancing a waltz requires 2 partners. Documentum and SharePoint next to each other creates to silo’s of information and it goes beyond telling that such is a bad thing. They must be connected.
With SDF we can can make that happen. As EMC’s Consulting Preferred Partner (C3P) we know how to bridge those two worlds. Not only is such a matter of knowing the technical bits of the SharePoint Documentum Framework (SDF) but also the ability to help the customer bridge the two silo’s of people in their organisation. Those that want freedom to collaborate and those that want to control and meet compliance. Bringing those worlds together is what makes projects a success.
We at Informed Consulting are glad to help out. Just reach out. We may not all shine on the ballroom floor, we do in the Information Management arena.
