“We are delighted with the close working relationship we have with multiple ECM partners in Central and Eastern Europe. The technology developments, based upon the Microsoft Office system, and integrated closely with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, will potentially give added value to millions of Microsoft Office users. These innovations are very important both for the local software economy and for thousands of organisations who want to take advantage of an affordable Enterprise Content Management solution.” Kees Pronk, Microsoft, Director Information Worker Business Group for Central and Eastern Europe.
“Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 will be the most integrated platform we ever brought to market. The current (2003) version of the SharePoint product and technologies brought great value for collaboration, portal and intranet applications; all tightly integrated with our well-known and used MS Office desktop applications. The next release will add full content and document management capabilities, electronic forms, search functionality (external repositories included) and business applications. Our information worker partners all over Europe are currently investing in expertise to make sure our customers can translate this into increased productivity, better business insights and improved business performance.” Wim Dierickx, Microsoft, Product and Solution Manager, EMEA, SharePoint.
With the release of Office System 2007, Microsoft has built a world-class enterprise ECM platform with an integrated architecture that anticipates the recognised challenges of enterprise content management. As part of the Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007, due to be released in the second half of calendar year 2006, Microsoft will provide comprehensive ECM capabilities to make its overall ECM vision available to all organisations.
With this solid foundation, Microsoft’s ECM offering will provide organisations with an integrated solution for managing the entire lifecycle of different type of content including documents, forms, images, email, IM and more. The key components of an ECM solution, such as web content management, records management, and document management/collaboration, search and workflow will be provided on this unified platform. Moreover, these components are designed to work together, to be flexible, and to interoperate with other technologies.
User acceptance and uptake will be increased thanks to an intuitive interface that integrates with common Microsoft applications such as Word, Outlook, FrontPage and web browsers. Reliance on IT is minimised thanks to a familiar interface that allows users to make ECM an extension of their normal workload, and IT maintenance time is further reduced by the fact that the solution can be centrally deployed and managed using common tools and services. Finally, the solution has been designed with great flexibility and scalability to suit any organisation’s pace, whether it is deployed for a particular team or task, or throughout the organisation.
Microsoft’s overall vision for ECM in Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 is based on the following tenets:
• Deliver comprehensive functionality on a unified foundation.
• Design for widespread user adoption.
• Design for heterogeneous environments.
• Design for maximum flexibility.
Deliver comprehensive functionality on a unified foundation
Microsoft’s ECM design philosophy has been to create an integrated ECM platform based on a common framework of components and technologies, designed for scalability, interoperability and stability. A unified architecture provides a common set of services like the web part framework, integrated search, integrated user management and user rights, digital rights management, workflow, security model and collaboration as well as a unified repository infrastructure for storing ECM objects of all types and sizes: documents, emails, forms, images, web content objects, discussion threads, lists, web links, etc. This ensures integration and consistency across the various ECM components like document management, Records management, web content management and Forms management. Microsoft’s unified ECM architecture also and supports individuals, teams, and business units, through intranet, extranet, and internet sites without requiring the use of disparate systems for these different scenarios.
Thanks to this common architecture, customers can reuse applications, code, and site content, enabling a common development and deployment experience for developers and IT professionals respectively. It also means rapid deployment, low training costs, and minimises the burden on IT to deploy and maintain multiple solutions for different business functions.
Design for widespread user adoption
In order to realise its vision for making ECM a solution for every information worker, Microsoft’s ECM offering has been designed with ease of use in mind. This ease of use comes from tools and interfaces that are already familiar to users and don’t require a lot of training. By basing its ECM solution on the already popular SharePoint Products and Technologies environment, Microsoft offers users a recognisable browser based interface that is the same, irrespective of the type of content that the user works with.
Deep integration with the Microsoft Office environment makes ECM a natural extension of the authoring process and provides users with an easy way to adopt and support an organisation’s ECM strategy. With this integration, the required adjustment will be minimal – users will simply be adding on to their routine documents rather than having to learn new processes. While the ECM capabilities are accessible through web browsers and previous versions of Microsoft Office, there are a number of new integration points with the Office System 2007 client designed for information workers. These include starting a workflow from within the ‘File’ menu of the client application, notifying users of a pending workflow task, exposing document properties to the user via a document information panel, displaying site policies on the document and taking library files offline in Microsoft Outlook.
Design for heterogeneous environments
Being able to coexist and interoperate with the myriad of systems available to customers today is fundamental to Microsoft’s design philosophy. Microsoft is committed to openness of architecture, whether it is through published APIs, a design philosophy based on common protocols and open standards like XML, or support for web services.
Integrating with customer hardware, software, and network environments is and always will be a critical requirement. Microsoft is committed to making it easy for customers to leverage their existing IT investments by providing the integration points and “hooks” for interoperability. Of course, Microsoft will continue to add to the already extensive list of web parts for integration with common applications like SAP, so ECM can extend smoothly into every aspect of the organisation’s working life.
Design for maximum flexibility
While committed to delivering a comprehensive set of ECM capabilities out of the box, Microsoft understands that every industry and organisation has unique needs. Rather than treating these needs as afterthoughts, Microsoft product teams have devoted substantial efforts to understanding these types of needs and tailoring product extensibility to support them. This extensibility ranges from simple configurability of out of the box capabilities to customisation for specific needs using familiar development environments like Microsoft FrontPage and Visual Studio 2005.
For example, ideas of what should happen when a document expires seem to differ from customer to customer. Rather than making an inflexible design decision, Microsoft ECM treats document expiration as an extensible event. Similarly, organisations can build their own content types, policies and workflows within Microsoft ECM framework to suit their individual needs. In addition, Microsoft supports an ecosystem of partners and independent software vendors (ISVs), which provide applications and solutions for specific needs.
Key components of Microsoft’s ECM offering
Document management capabilities
No matter what departments they work in, every user within an organisation will be familiar with the various concerns related to document management. Consider the lifecycle of the average document. First the document is created, then saved, then perhaps shared with other users, then perhaps modified by other users. New versions are developed, and all must be tracked and organised.
Microsoft’s ECM solution helps organisations realise their document management goals by enabling appropriate policies at every step of the document’s lifecycle. Centralised repositories improve information discovery and policies can be set that facilitate the document’s tracking throughout the organisation using labels and barcodes. Additionally this centralised and managed storage results in an increased ability to predict storage requirements and better protect information assets against unauthorised use and inadvertent loss via item level security and server side Information Rights management.
Microsoft’s document management capability harnesses the collective expertise of the organisation and facilitates workflow through collaborative tools such as document check-in and check-out, version control, and workflows to automate the approval/review processes.
Records management capabilities
Records management has long suffered from being marginalized as a secondary task – only now with the need to ensure compliance with government and EU regulations are organisations starting to prioritise this important aspect of the business cycle. Imperatives in this area include the need for clearly assigned records management responsibility overall and within the departments; the need for continuously updated records that minimise outdated information within the organisation, and of course the ultimate need to maximise transparency and protect the organisation from audit and legal worries. And finally, a good records management policy ensures the preservation of vital company information that ensures business continuity in the case of disaster.
Records management capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 give records managers the ability to set up a records repository according to the organisation’s file plan. This repository exhibits “vault” behaviour, which ensures that the records in it are not altered in any way. Multiple libraries for organising different types of business records can be created and retention policies can be set based on the retention schedules. Records can be captured from external sources like document management systems, email servers and Microsoft Outlook and routed to the correct location in the repository. Physical records can be managed as well. The system also provides the ability to specify an action when the expiration date is reached which either disposes the record or starts a workflow that can allow the records manager to take action like moving this record to a long term archive. Auditing policies can be turned on to log all activity against a record library and administrators have the ability to see reports on the usage. The “Hold” functionality assists in managing the legal discovery process by superseding the retention policy on a record under discovery, so that it is not disposed off even when the expiration trigger is reached.
Web content management capabilities
The major goal of Microsoft’s web content management system is to help businesses effectively communicate with employees, partners, and customers, to preserve corporate branding and look and feel, and to put publishing power into the hands of business users. Microsoft’s web content management solution enables organisations to easily manage multiple, multilingual sites and mobile devices content, while ensuring that these sites can be updated in a timely manner.
Web content management capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 include rich authoring capabilities for business users using a simple browser based editor. Authoring can be done in the context of the web page giving authors a much better visual experience of the process. Microsoft Word can also be used as an authoring tool and conversion functionality translates these pages to HTML. Out of the box workflows are available to submit the content for approval before it is published to the website. The system provides complete flexibility in controlling the look and feel of the site as well as separating the look and feel of the site from the content. Navigation controls are provided out of the box and site navigation is configurable with many options. Completely customisable CSS-based styling of all aspects of the site provides further control over the look and feel. A multi-stage publishing model provides authors with a simple way to publish content to multiple web sites by allowing the Site Manager to set up automatic publishing of pages to the website from the staging system at regular intervals. A “Quick Deploy” capability is also enabled, which allows authors to immediately move content from staging to production without requiring emergency help from IT. This is particularly useful for content like breaking news which needs to be published immediately.
Web content management capabilities also include a site variation management system that enables users to manage the site in several forms, publish in multiple languages, and push content to mobile devices. A new site manager console provides a file explorer like view of the site content. Site managers can use this console to perform batch actions (like submit for approval) on a large number of items as well as run reports across multiple sites in a particular site collection.
Organisations can quickly establish a web presence via starter templates for internet and intranet sites. The performance of the system has been optimised to support highly scalable websites. Anonymous users are supported for general access while forms based authentication is supported against a variety of membership systems. Out-of-the-box support is provided for Active Directory, Active Directory in Application Mode (ADAM) as well as LDAP. Authenticated members can get a personalised experience.
Forms management
Forms are a key component of any business process and are typically used to capture and validate the data driving the process. They usually hide the complexities of the business process that sits behind it. Forms Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 provide the ability to create forms that can be filled out with a variety of web browsers enabling a large number of people to initiate a business process such as filling out a loan application or entering a customer service request. This can happen via the internet, extranet or intranet. New forms can be created using pre-designed template parts to ensure consistency across all form solutions and use pre-configured data connections to speed up forms solution design.
Over to you…
As enterprise content management becomes a top priority for CEOs and IT executives alike, Microsoft is making an important commitment to ECM solutions. Microsoft’s vision is to ensure that customers derive the most value from their content and their people, by supporting the entire content lifecycle from creation through collaboration, management, publication, reuse, archiving, and expiration.
Since maximum user adoption is so crucial to ECM success, Microsoft has focused on providing intuitive tools in a familiar environment, to ensure users not only adopt ECM solutions but ultimately champion ECM’s capacity for streamlining their workloads and helping them get their jobs done more efficiently and effectively.
Microsoft is assuming a role as a leader in the next generation of integrated user-oriented ECM systems. By prioritising ECM in the Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 release and integrating a comprehensive solution with familiar environments like Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, Microsoft is providing companies with an intuitive solution that integrates with users’ existing workflow, resulting in less training time for users and a reduced burden on IT. With an integrated platform that shares common tools, this solution will be easily deployed and managed by the IT department, resulting in further IT cost savings.
In considering the shared needs that carry across all segment of ECM, as well as the special needs of each ECM segment – document management, records management, web content management and forms management – Microsoft is providing organisations with an overall solution can be used throughout the organisation. While enterprise content management may have seemed like a daunting task at first glance, organisations will learn that with an intuitive and scalable solution, ECM can easily become integral to business processes and essential to business success.