“One size fits all” ECM platform?
Amplexor ECM Bulletin – September 2008
Summer holiday has ended which means the "budget planning season" is around the corner. In many organizations, projects will be defined and budgeted. Studies by Forester, Gartner and alike have shown that Enterprise Content Management is one of the key areas in ICT nowadays: it will probably be also on your budget list.
But ECM is a minefield for the ICT buyer because "ECM" can mean many anything from web content management to document management, email management, records management and many more disciplines.
Is it possible that one ECM product can meet all different content management needs? The software vendors will of course say their product can do it all and in budget exercises, it is also much easier for potential buyers to use this approach. Standardization on one specific platform might seem a healthy strategy, but we believe that a "best of breed approach" by possibly combining different ECM products/point solutions is perfectly viable: no vendor today has an overall integrated solution that can compete with more specialized packages. Using different software packages will avoid costly and hard to maintain customizations and the project cycle will be shortened if you can use the out-of-the-box functionalities to meet the customer needs.
If you are worried about possible integration issues, be assured: you can find state-of-the-art platforms that truly adhere to open standards and provide really powerful and flexible integration options. They allow you to offer your content management functionalities 'as-a-service' to other platforms and applications.
So take your time to evaluate and understand your different ECM needs and translate them into the different ECM disciplines and products. It is also a good idea to hire an experienced ECM consultant who has a good overview of the available products and solutions in the market: their hands-on expertise can save you a lot of time and money.
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