I’m at the IBM Content 2015 road show mini-conference in Toronto today, and sat in on a session with Mike Winter (who I know from my long-ago days at FileNet prior to its acquisition by IBM) discussing ECM in the cloud.
The content at the conference so far has been really lightweight: I think that IBM sees this more as a pre-sales prospecting presentation than an actual informational conference for existing customers. Although there is definitely a place for the former, it should not necessarily be mixed with the latter; it just frustrates knowledgeable customers who were really looking for more product detail and maybe some customer presentations.
ECM in the cloud has a lot of advantages, such as being able to access content on mobile devices and share with external parties, but also has a lot of challenges in terms of security — or, at least, perceived security — when implementing in larger enterprise environments. IBM ECM has a very robust and granular security/auditing model that was already in place for on-premise capabilities; they’re working to bring that same level of security and auditing to hybrid and cloud implementations. They are using the CMIS content management standard as the API into their Navigator service for cloud implementation: their enhanced version of CMIS provides cloud access to their repositories. The typical use case is for a cloud application to access an ECM repository that is either on premise or in IBM’s SoftLayer managed hosting in a sync-and-share scenario; arguably, this is not self-provisioned ECM in the cloud as you would see from cloud ECM vendors such as Box, although they are getting closer to it with per-user subscription pricing. This is being rolled out under the Navigator brand, which is a bit confusing since Navigator is also the term used for the desktop UI. There was a good discussion on user authentication for hybrid scenarios: basically, IBM replicates the customers’ LDAP on a regular basis, and is moving to do the same via a SAML service in the future.
Winter gave us a quick demo of the cloud (hosted) Navigator running against a repository in Amsterdam: adding a document, adding tags (metadata) and comments, viewing via an HTML5 viewer that includes annotations, and more. Basically, a nice web-based UI on an IBM ECM repository, with most of the rich functionality exposed. It’s quick to create a shared teamspace and add documents for collaboration, and create simple review workflows. He’s a tech guy, so didn’t know the SLA or the pricing, although he did know that the pricing is tiered.