As more and more organizations recognize the value of the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration and content management platform, they are also realizing that their content management requirements often exceed what SharePoint can deliver. EMC has partnered with Microsoft to fully integrate the EMC Documentum platform with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to fill in the gaps in content management but retain what SharePoint brings to the table in terms of services and UI. I recently talked with Lance Shaw, senior product manager at EMC, to learn more about the two products that resulted from this collaboration: Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint and Documentum Content Services for SharePoint.
According to Shaw, companies that are using SharePoint face several business challenges because of how easy it is for users to quickly get a SharePoint site up and running, which can lead to hundreds of thousands of sites across an organization. Companies are struggling to find cost-effective ways to manage all these disconnected information silos long-term and in a centrally controlled manner. "I talk to IT managers all the time who are concerned with the proliferation of SharePoint sites," said Shaw. "When you move into terabytes of data, the long-term storage of that data becomes a cost concern. Companies need to be forward-looking and find a solution ahead of time rather be reactive a few years later." Companies also need to be concerned with information retention policies and compliance issues as well as electronic discovery for litigation purposes.
To address these concerns, EMC has created two products, which, used together, provide a total document management and archival solution: Archive Services for SharePoint and Content Services for SharePoint. Archive Services lets individuals use SharePoint as they normally would, but at some point the process or project is complete and data can be archived. Archive Services lets you move content to a designated Documentum repository to free up resources on your SharePoint server. The other half of the duo, Content Services, lets you browse, search, find, and take action on documents (depending on access controls), without having to leave SharePoint.
With these two tools, Documentum customers now have a friendly front-end for their information management infrastructure, and SharePoint users gain long-term storage, better compliance and retention policy capabilities, and enhanced content services that augment and extend the SharePoint platform and make it even more successful in an organization.
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