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IBM Case Manager Technical Roundtable

Bill Lobig, Mike Marin, Peggy (didn’t catch her last name) and Lauren Mayes hosted a freeform roundtable for any technical questions about the new Case Manager product.

I had a chat with Mike prior to the talk, and he reinforced this during the session, about the genesis of Case Manager: although there were a lot of ideas that came from the old BPF product, Mike and his team spent months interviewing the people who had used BPF to find out what worked and what didn’t work, then built something new that incorporated the features most needed by customers. The object model for the case is now part of the basic server classes rather than being a higher-level (and therefore less efficient) custom object, there are new process classes to map properties between case folders and processes, and a number of other significant architectural changes and upgrades to make this happen. I see TIBCO going through this same pain right now with the lack of upgrade path from iProcess to AMX BPM, and to the guy in the audience who said that it’s not fair that IBM gives you a crappy product, you use it and provide feedback on how to improve it, then they charge you for the new product: well, that’s just how software works sometimes, and vendors will never have true innovation if they always have to be supporting their (and your) entire legacy. There does need to be some sort of migration path at least for the completed case folder objects from BPF to Case Manager native case objects, although that hasn’t been announced, since these are long-term corporate assets that have to be managed the same as any other content; however, I would not expect any migration of the BPF apps themselves.

More process functionality is being built right into the content engine; this is significant in that you’ve always required both ECM and BPM to do any process management, but it sounds like some functionality is being drawn into the content engine. Does this mean that the content and process engines eventually be merged into a single platform and a single product? That would drive further down the road of repositioning FileNet BPM as content-centric – originally done at the time of the FileNet acquisition, I believe, to avoid competition with WebSphere BPM – since if it’s truly content-centric, then why not just converge the engines, including the ACM capabilities? That would certainly make for a more seamless and consistent development environment, especially around issues like object modeling and security.

One consistent message that’s coming across in all the Case Manager sessions is accelerating the development time by allowing a business analyst to create a large part of a case application without involving IT; this is part of what BPF was trying to provide, and even BPM prior to that. I was FileNet’s evangelist for the launch of the eProcess product, which was the first version of the current generation of BPM, and we put forward the idea back in 2000 that a non-technical (or semi-technical) analyst could do some amount of the model-driven application development.

There are obviously still some rough edges in Case Manager still, since version 1.0 isn’t even out yet. In a previous session, we saw some of the kludges for content analytics, dashboarding and business rules, and it sounds like role-based security and e-forms isn’t really fully integrated either. The implications of these latter two are tied up with the ease in which you can migrate a case application from one environment to another, such as from development to test to production: apparently, not completely seamless, although they are able to bundle part of a case application/template and move it between environments in a single operation. Every vendor needs to deal with this issue, and those that have a more tightly integrated set of objects making up an application have a much easier time with this, especially if they also offer a cloud version of their software and need to migrate easily between on premise and cloud environments, such as TIBCO, Fujitsu and Appian. IBM is definitely playing catchup in the area of moving defined applications between environments, as well as their overall integration strategy within Case Manager.

IOD ECM Keynote

Ron Ercanbrack, VP at IBM (my old boss from my brief tenure at FileNet in 2000-1, who once introduced me at a FileNet sales kickoff conference as the “Queen of BPM”), gave a brief ECM-focused keynote this morning. He covered quite a bit of the information that I was briefed on last week, including Case Manager, Content Analytics, improved content integration including CMIS, the Datacap and PSS acquisitions, enhancements to Content Collector, and more. He positioned Case Manager as a product “running on top of BPM”, which is a bit different than the ECM-centric message that I’ve heard so far, but likely also accurate: there are definitely significant components of each in there.

He was followed by Carl Kessler, VP of Development, to give a Case Manager demo; this covered the end-user case management environment (pretty much what we’ve seen in previous sessions, only live), plus Content Analytics for text mining which is not really integrated with Case Manager: it’s a separate app with a different look and feel. I missed the launch point, so I don’t know whether he launched this from a property value in Case Manager or had to start from scratch using the terms relevant to that case. It has some very nice text mining capabilities for searching through the content repository for correlation of terms, including some pretty graphs, but it’s a separate app.

We then went off to the Cognos Real-time Monitoring Dashboard, which is yet again another non-integrated app with a different look and feel. He showed a dashboard that had a graph for average age of cases and allowed drill-down on different parameters such as industry type and dispute type, but that’s not really the same as a fully integrated product suite. Although all of the components applications are functional, this needs a lot more integration at the end-user level.

I did get a closer look at some of the Case Builder functionality than I’ve seen already: in the tasks definition section, there are required tasks, optional tasks and user-created tasks, although it’s not clear what user-created tasks are since this is design-time, not runtime.

Ercanbrack came back to the stage for a brief panel with three customers – Bank of America, State of North Dakota, and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee – talking about their ECM journeys. This was not specific to case management at all, but using records/retention management to reduce storage costs and risks in financial services, using e-discovery as part of a legal action in healthcare, and content management with a case management approach for allowing multiple state government agencies to share documents more effectively.

IBM Announcements: Case Manager, CMIS and More

I had a pre-IOD analyst briefing last week from IBM with updates to their ECM portfolio, given by Ken Bisconti, Dave Caldera and Craig Rhinehart. IOD – Information on Demand – is IBM’s conference covering business analytics and information management, the latter of which includes data management and content management. The former FileNet products fall into their content management portfolio (including FileNet BPM, which was repositioned as document-centric BPM following the acquisition so as to not compete with the WebSphere BPM products), and includes case management capabilities in their Business Process Framework (BPF). I also had a one-to-one session with Bisconti while at IOD to get into a bit more detail.

The big announcement, at least to me, was the new Case Manager product, to ship in Q4 (probably November, although IBM won’t commit to that). IBM has been talking about an advanced case management strategy for several months now, and priming the pump about what “should” be in a case management product, but this is the first that we’ve seen a real product as part of that strategy; I’m sure that the other ACM vendors with products already released are ROFL over IBM’s statement in the press release that this is the “industry’s first advanced case management product”. With FileNet Content Manager at the core for managing the case file and the associated content, they’ve drawn on a variety of offerings across different software groups and brands to create this product: ILOG rules, Cognos realtime monitoring, Lotus collaboration and social networking, and WebSphere Process Server to facilitate integration to multiple systems. This is one of their “industry solutions” that spans multiple software groups, and I can just imagine the internal political wrangling that went on to make this happen. As excited as they sounded about bringing all these assets together in a new product, they’ll need to demonstrate a seamless integration and common user experience so that this doesn’t end up looking like some weird FrankenECM. Judging from the comments at the previous session that I attended, it sounds like the ILOG integration, at the very least, is a bit shaky in the first release.

They’re providing analytics – both via the updated Content Analytics offering (discussed below) and Cognos – to allow views of individual case progression as well as analysis of persistent case information to detect patterns in case workload. It sounds like they’re using Cognos for analyzing the case metadata, and Content Analytics for analyzing the unstructured information, e.g., documents and emails, associated with the case.

A key capability of any case management system, and this is no exception, is the ability to handle unstructured work, allowing a case worker to use their own experience to determine the next steps to progress the case towards outcome. Workers can create tasks and activities that use the infrastructure of queues and inboxes; this infrastructure is apparently new as part of this offering, and not based on FileNet BPM. Once a case is complete, it remains in the underlying Content Manager repository, where it is subject to retention policies like any other content. They’ve made the case object and its tasks native content types, so like any other content class in FileNet Content Manager, you can trigger workflows (in BPM) based on the native event types of the content class, such as when the object is created or updated. The old Business Process Framework (BPF), which was the only prior IBM offering in the case management arena, isn’t being discontinued, but customers will definitely be encouraged to create any new case management applications on Case Manager rather than BPF, and eventually to rewrite their BPF applications to take advantage of new features.

As we’re seeing in many other BPM and case management products, they’ve created the ability to deploy reusable templates for vertical solutions in order to reduce the time required to deploy a solution from months down to days. IBM’s focus will initially be on the horizontal platform, and they’re relying on partners and customers to build the industry-specific templates. Partners in the early adoption program are already providing templates for claims, wealth management and other solutions. The templates are designed for use by business analysts, so that a BA can use a pre-defined template to create and deploy a case management solution with minimal IT involvement.

For user experience, they’re providing three distinct interfaces:

A workbench for BAs to create case solutions, based on the afore-mentioned templates, using a wizard-based interface. This includes building the end user portal environment with the IBM iWidget component (mashup) environment.
A role-based portal for end users, created by the BAs in the workbench, with personalization options for the case worker.
Analytics/reporting dashboards reporting on case infrastructure for managers and case workers, leveraging Cognos and Content Analytics.

They did have some other news aside from the Case Manager announcement; another major content-related announcement is support for the CMIS standard, allowing IBM content repositories (FileNet CM, IBM CM8 and CMOD) to integrate more easily with non-IBM systems. This is in a technology preview only at this point, but since IBM co-authored the standard, you can expect full support for it in the future. I had a recent discussion with Pega indicating that they were supporting CMIS in their case management/BPM environment, and we’re seeing the same from other vendors, meaning that you’ll be able to integrate an industrial strength repository like FileNet CM into the BPM or ACM platform of your choice.

They had a few other announcements and points to discuss on the call:

IBM recently acquired Datacap, a document capture (scanning) product company, which refreshes their high-performance document scanning and automated recognition capabilities. This integrates with FileNet CM, but also with the older IBM CM8 Content Manager and (soon) CMOD, plus other non-IBM content repositories. Datacap uses a rules-based capability for better content capture, recognition and classification.
There are improvements to Office Document Services; this is one of the areas where CMIS will help as well, allowing IBM to hold its nose and improve their integration with SharePoint and Exchange. There’s a big focus on content governance, such as managing retention lifecycles, including content federation across multiple heterogeneous repositories.
There are updates to the information lifecycle governance (ILG) portfolio, including Content Collector and eDiscovery. Content Collector has better content collection, analysis and management capabilities for office documents, email and SAP data. eDiscovery now provides better support for legal discovery cases, with enhanced security roles for granular content access, redaction APIs and better keyword identification. This ties back into governance, content lifecycle management and retention management: disposal of information at the appropriate times is key to reducing legal discovery costs, since you’re not having to retrieve, distribution and review a lot of content that is no longer legally required.
IBM’s recent acquisition of PSS Systems complements the existing records management and eDiscovery capabilities with retention-related analytics and policy solutions.
The relatively new IBM Content Analytics (ICA) product has been updated, providing analytics on content retention management (i.e., find what you need to decommission) as well as more general “BI for content” for advanced analytics on what’s in your content repositories and related contextual data from other sources. This integrates out of the box with Cognos (which begs the question, why isn’t this actually just Cognos) as well as the new Case Manager product to provide analytics for the manager dashboard views. The interesting thing is that “content” in this situation is more than just IBM content repositories, it’s also competitive content repositories and even things like Twitter feeds via IBM’s new BigInsights offering. They have a number of ICA technology demos here at IOD, including the BigInsights/Twitter analysis, and ICA running on Hadoop infrastructure for scalability.
The only announcement for FileNet BPM seemed to be expanding to some new Linux platforms, and I’ve heard that they’re refactoring the process engine to improve performance and maintenance but no whiff of new functionality aside from the Case Manager announcement. I plan to attend the BPM technical briefing this afternoon, and should have some more updates after that.

I still find the IBM ECM portfolio – much like their BPM and other portfolios – to contain too many products: clearly, some of these should be consolidated, although IBM’s strategy seems to be to never sunset a product if they have a couple of others that do almost the same thing and there’s a chance that they can sell you all of them.

Advanced Case Management Empowering The Business Analyst

We’re still a couple of hours away from the official announcement about the release of IBM Case Manager, and I’m at a session on how business analysts will work with Case Manager to build solutions based on templates.

Like the other ACM sessions, this one starts with an overview of IBM’s case management vision as well as the components that make up the Case Manager product: ECM underlying it all, with Lotus Sametime for real-time presence and chat, ILOG JRules for business rules, Cognos Real Time Monitor for dashboards, IBM Content Analytics for unstructured content analysis, IBM (Lotus) Mashup Center for user interface and some new case management task and workflow functionality that uses P8 BPM under the covers. Outside the core of Case Manager, WebSphere Process Server can be invoked for integration/SOA applications, although it appears that this is done by calling it from P8 BPM, which was existing functionality. On top of this, there are pre-built solutions and solution templates, as well as a vast array of services from IBM GBS and partners.

The focus in this session is on the tools for the business analyst in the design-time environment, either based on a template or from scratch, including the user interface creation in the Mashup Center environment, analytics for both real-time and historical views of cases, and business rules. This allows a business analyst to capture requirements from the business users and create a working prototype that will form the shell of the final case application, if not the full executing application. The Case Builder environment that a business analyst works in to design case solutions also allows for testing and deploying the solution, although in most cases you won’t have your BAs deploying directly to a production environment.

Defining a case solution stats with the top-level case solution creation, including name, description and properties, then completing the following:

Define case types
Specify roles

Define role inbasket

Define personal inbasket
Define document types
Associate runtime UI pages

We didn’t see the ILOG JRules integration, and for good reason: in the Q&A, they admitted that this first version of Case Manager didn’t quite have that up to scratch, so I imagine that you have to work in both design environments, then call JRules from a BPM step or something of that nature.

The more that I see of Case Manager, the more I see the case management functionality that was starting to migrate into the FileNet ECM/BPM product from the Business Process Framework (BPF); I predicted that BPF would become part of the core product when I reviewed P8 BPM v4.5 a year and a half ago, and while this is being released as a separate product rather than part of the core ECM product, BPF is definitely being pushed to the side and IBM won’t be encouraging the creation of any new applications based on BPF. There’s no direct migration path from BPF to ACM; BPF technology is a bit old, and the time has come for it to be abandoned in favor of a more modern architecture, even if some of the functionality is replicated in the new system.

The step editor used to define the tasks associated with cases provides swimlanes for roles or workgroups (for underlying queue assignment, I assume), then allows the designer to add steps into the lanes and assign properties to the steps. The step properties are a simplified version of a step definition in P8 BPM, so I assume that this is actually a shared model (as opposed to export/import) that can be opened directly by the more technical BPM Process Designer. In P8 BPM 4.5, they introduced a “diagram mode” for business analysts in the Process Designer; this appears to be an even simpler process diagramming environment. It’s not BPMN compliant, which I think is a huge mistake; since it’s a workflow-style model with lanes, activities and split/merge are supported, this would have been a great opportunity to use the standard BPMN shapes to start getting BAs used to it.

I still have my notes from last week’s analyst briefing and my meeting with Ken Bisconti from yesterday which I will publish; these are more aligned with the “official” announcement that will be coming out today in conjunction with the press release.

Wiki Tuesday: Wikis at RBC

Yes, I know that today is not Tuesday, but this is about our previous Toronto Wiki Tuesday, a monthly meetup where we have a presentation on wikis, lift a few pints and hobnob with wiki specialists such as Martin Cleaver (who also organizes Wiki Tuesdays) and Mike Dover (responsible for the research behind Wikinomics, and co-author of the upcoming Wikibrands).

The presenter at this session was Tim Hanlon from Royal Bank of Canada, talking about RBC’s journey and future plans with wikis inside the bank. He’s part of the Applied Innovation team, who are tasked with identifying and applying emerging technologies: a sort of center of excellence for technology innovation. They’re within the Technology and Operations area, but half of their team is technical and half business, with a collection of skills that is very similar to a typical CoE.

First, a short lesson on Canadian banks: we only have five, they’ve been around since before Canada was a country, they don’t take a lot of risks, they own all aspects of our financial life, and RBC is the biggest. As you can imagine, wiki adoption in a large, conservative enterprise that’s been around for 150 years poses a few cultural challenges. I did a near full-time contract in part of RBC in 2003-4, and spent some time pushing the use of SharePoint (the only thing available internally) to get people collaborating, so I can appreciate some of the struggles that they’re having with the same culture and bit newer technology.

Hanlon outlined their progress to date:

In 2006, wiki functionality was enabled in SharePoint, but there was no widespread education about its use or benefits, hence no widespread adoption. Around this time, however, people started to accept Wikipedia as a reference source, which validated the use of wikis in general: in other words, it wasn’t that the RBC users didn’t believe that wikis could work, they just saw themselves as consumers rather than contributors. From my experience, this is a classic large enterprise attitude: many people don’t have the time or the inclination to take that first step to being a wiki author.
Over 2007-8, the SharePoint wiki attempts in RBC were seen, in general, as a failure. This was blamed on the technology, although that was only part of the problem. During that time period, a Confluence pilot was started.
In 2009, Confluence was rolled out as part of the corporate standard technology infrastructure: what the RBC architecture review committee that I used to sit on there referred to as the “bricks”, which are products that any department can select and implement without special approval.
Currently, they have 66 active instances of Confluence (paid version), mostly focused around projects. There are 1,000-1,500 total creators and participants across these instances, with a potential viewing audience of 10,000 internal users. Users are primarily at head office, with very little branch involvement. There is no external access to the wikis.

We spent some amount of time discussing the issues that they had with SharePoint. Some of these were cultural, due to the document-oriented nature of SharePoint: the standard wiki edit functionality looked very much like editing a Word document, and people were conditioned not to edit other people’s “completed” documents. Instead, they would email their changes to the wiki team, which really defeats the purpose of a wiki. Confluence has a very different user interface for editing, which allowed people to disassociate the idea of editing a wiki page from editing someone else’s document. As Hanlon pointed out, they could have customized SharePoint to make it look and feel more like Confluence, potentially avoiding these problems, but they didn’t even know that was the problem until they moved from SharePoint to Confluence.

Since RBC’s Confluence use is mostly for projects, it’s used for things such as meeting agendas and minutes. Last year, I wrote a post based on some research that I was doing with a few clients and around the web, covering the topic of when to use ECM versus a wiki: opinions ranged from “use a wiki only if there are no security requirements and you need to maximize accessibility, an ECM for everything else” to “use wikis for internal content by default, and ECM only for specific cases”. It would be interesting to see if RBC’s experiences with splitting content between ECM and wikis have matched what I’ve seen in other organizations. RBC is using SharePoint as their main document repository, and provide some easy functionality for linking to these documents from Confluence, but project documents are still often imported directly to Confluence. They’ve also found wikis useful for event calendars.

Adoption within the enterprise continues to be a struggle: Hanlon pointed out that they’re out trying to evangelize about wikis to people who just got good intranet search, so may not be ready for the idea of user-generated content. However, they’ve had a lot of success with tagging within Confluence, since many people don’t equate tagging with creating content. He said that they’re getting fairly good participation, but that the slow uptake on content creation is happening at typical “bank speed”. They’re still working on defining where wikis are appropriate, and how to educate the masses on what they are and how to use them: it’s important that wikis are not seen as just some extra thing that people need to do, but as a way of making their job easier. Although Hanlon and many others in the room saw the use of wikis as “creative” and therefore something that people will just want to do, I’ve spent too many hours with back-office workers to think that they’re going to be swayed by the argument that this lets them be more creative in their work. They’re finding that most people will still comment rather than edit, then email responses or requests for changes to the wiki team.

There’s a lot that they haven’t done yet: they haven’t yet started to work with plugins, such as ones that I’ve seen for content approval workflow. There is no federated search that includes the Confluence content, although they do have enterprise search that covers their intranet, shared drives and SharePoint content. They have an internal community of practice (Hanlon’s group), but no real training to roll out across the potential user base. There’s no single sign-on, and about half of the Confluence instances require a login. There’s little customization in terms of appearance, and they’re considering more of an RBC-specific skinning, although this could backfire if people then become confused over what’s part of the (uneditable) intranet versus a wiki. They’re still working out what to put in a wiki versus SharePoint (which is their document repository). In other words, lots of work for the RBC wiki team in the future.

So what does RBC need to do in order to push forward with wikis? They are starting to see value from wikis in content creation, but accept that Word and Outlook still rule in that area; in my experience, most content creation isn’t even making it into an ECM system (if one exists), but is on network drives and in email attachments. They need to balance the corporate need for control with the bottom-up wiki usage and folksonomy, likely by involving some wiki gardeners to help curate the content without controlling it. They need to push past the regulatory and information security mindset that exists within financial institutions, since regulations and privacy don’t apply to much of the information that would likely be stored on internal wikis. They need to understand the long-term value proposition for updating wiki content: what’s in it both for the individual and the company. Lastly, they need to make the long-time RBC employees see themselves as content creators, not just content consumers.

At the end of it all, a very informative talk on the struggles and successes with wiki adoption within a large enterprise. And, at the end of the night, I somehow ended up volunteering to speak at the June event, on using wikis with ECM and BPM. Hope to see you there.

AIIM webinar on content and process

I’m the headline act in an upcoming webinar, Content: Meet the Business Process, hosted by AIIM and sponsored by SAP, on November 11th at 2pm ET. Although I spend a lot of my time focused on BPM, I have a pretty strong background in content management as well: almost every client that I work with has to deal with content and process together.

I’ll cover some of the key benefits of bringing together content and process, walk through a couple of case studies, and end up with some suggestions on getting started with content-centric cross-departmental processes.

Open Text Social Media briefing

I had a chance to meet with Cheryl McKinnon from Open Text while here at the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a briefing and a demo of Open Text Social Media, their enterprise social software offering to be released within a few weeks. This is a part of the Enterprise 2.0 market that I’m really interested in: how do we add a social layer on existing enterprise platforms, such as enterprise content management (ECM)?

Open Text already has some amount of collaboration around document management in their product portfolio, as well as web content management. Since they have a solid content management platform backing all of the content, they’re able to add the necessary aspects of governance, compliance and security that has to surround certain content without, hopefully, that getting in the way of collaboration. The Open Text Social Media product is pushing that a step further, adding more social aspects to content collaboration. Most content management – and content collaboration that goes with it – focuses on connecting people to content; OTSM also connects people to people in a content-centric manner.

They started with a few basic principles: keep the user interface simple so that there would be few barriers to adoption, while maintaining the security, auditability and records management functionality from the underlying ECM suite. They’ve removed the requirement for the content to be viewed in the hierarchical folder-type fashion that is inherent in the ECM system, and added discussions and wikis as well as maintaining a social graph of person-to-person interactions. This provides three key areas of functionality:

The social network inside an enterprise
A social marketplace with customers and partners
A repository for “corporate memory”

We moved on to a demo, starting with the personal dashboard home screen that shows the status and presence indicator of people who I follow, communities to which I belong, and content that I have flagged to follow. My personal profile contains structured information, some of which can be pulled from LDAP/ActiveDirectory, plus Facebook-like status messages – this is what appears on the home screen of people who follow me – and my blog. Also, anywhere where my name appears within the site, hovering over the link pops up a mini view of my profile.

Communities are a combination of wikis, documents and discussions, and can be designated as public, public read-only, private and secret. All of these security designations are inside the firewall: “public”, for example, means that everyone inside the enterprise can see and contribute to it. Private read-only could be used for more traditional broadcast intranet content; private means that the content is hidden but the community is visible and anyone could request membership in the community; secret means that the community is hidden and available only by direct invitation. Discussions within a community appear on the “Feed” tab, and are fairly standard topic-based discussions where you can read and reply to the thread, with the additional ability to flag a topic so that it appears in my flagged items on my home screen, where new replies to the topic would be indicated: a sort of content subscription. There is no ability (yet) to include an external feed into a community, although there’s a bookmarklet to make it easy to share external links as part of a discussion. The “Documents” tab in a community is (I assume) a view into the underlying content repository, but is a flat list view rather than a folder-based hierarchy since presumably there would be a small number of documents in the community. I’m not sure how well that user interface will scale if a community has hundreds of documents on that tab, although there are filtering capabilities. The wiki tab within the community allows multiple wiki pages to be created, also apparently in a flat navigation structure which may not scale well. The wiki has pretty standard (and easy to use) edit and comment functionality, plus the ability to flag content to follow in my home page. There’s a complete revision history stored for each wiki page, and you can roll back to an earlier version if required.

All of the community content can be pushed into the ECM archive, which would enforce records retention and other governance rules, although we didn’t get into the details of how seamless that would be to community authors and readers.

The searching is where we really start to see the people-to-people capabilities: searches locate content, as you would expect, but also locate people and communities that are contributing to or discussing that content, as well as people who have the search terms in their profile or their blog posts.

They round it all out with some pretty slick applications for a Blackberry or iPhone. These are applications, not mobile versions of a website, so include persistent cache for use when you’re offline.

There’s an obvious overlap with SharePoint functionality here, and there will undoubtedly be a battle inside some organizations between these two proven enterprise platforms when it comes to social media. Open Text’s advantage is their ECM repository, which far out-performs anything that SharePoint has to offer, and can be used as the back-end content repository for SharePoint even if a customer decides to go that direction for their enterprise social networking. That’s not unique to Open Text; other ECM vendors such as IBM/FileNet also have SharePoint connectors to allow their repositories to be used to manage SharePoint content transparently. Open Text, however, goes beyond that by offering direct social networking extensions to their ECM platform that have the potential to replace SharePoint in an organization that has already standardized on Open Text’s ECM. This direct integration with a robust content repository provides them with a distinct advantage over the Enterprise 2.0 point solutions, and make them the one for the other ECM vendors to beat in the social enterprise content collaboration market.