Start from the beginning

Perhaps I should start from the beginning, but the question is of course what is the beginning? How knows? And was the early thoughts about the ECM Suite the ECM Suite that we see today (market through different kinds of Power Points).

Well again, Open Text provides us with a good library of ECM history through their community-site - it's perhaps not so intuitive and google-search-friendly that you could hope for, but it's a very good source of information.

One of the first evidence of the ECM Suite that I have found is the "Integrated Product Roadmap for Hummingbird Enterprise Customers" launched in December 2006.

A sidetrack for us eDOCS customers is that already then Email Management was high up on the agenda and they actually wrote; "Open Text will continue to support the Livelink ECM – eDOCS integration strategy with leading archival vendors such as Symantec and Zantaz.". Well I don't know what happened with this - what I know is that the e-mail products in eDOCS today is coming from a small Swedish Company called Traen (former Intelligo). Excellent and Highly skilled guys. I wonder if customers had reacted if Open Text instead had written; "Our E-mail strategy will be based on the ideas and genius of a small Swedish Company -we hope that these guys will help us out in the future".

Back to the ECM Suite. Already 2006 the framework was outlined, however it was not called Suite it was Livelink ECM 10 and the perspective was a little bit up-side down from what we are used to see it today:

• Library Services, the archive and the place for metadata management.
  
• Livelink ECM – BPM, the business process layer.
  
• Enterprise Connect, everyting is accessed from the familiar MS Outlook interface
  
• Artesia Digital Asset Management suite, ability to manage rich media through eDOCS.

Don't know why Artesia Digital Asset Management was so heavily focused. Perhaps because it was newly bought by Open Text then, but it only increases the confusion. And is Artesia integrated through eDOCS - haven't heard about it. Perhaps it was written because it sounded so nice (and it makes us eDOCS customer happy).

Was it the name that was misleading, ECM 10 sounded like three new well integrated products, a kind of new superdatabase, a tool for managing the business processes and then an userfriendly, super good Outlook interface for accesss. However that's not really the case as I now understand it, it's just a model describing a bunch of services and programs and that we have to dig into.

Putting the database first was not perhaps not such a bad idea. It's easy to say that we should bring the information silos together and we put it in the basement where no one else but the Database guys care. Nothing could be more wrong. The idea of the Library Services could bee seen from an Enterprise Architecture point of view. And building an Framework for Enterprise Architecture is a bit more then just installing a new common database.