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In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of “disruptive forces” that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:

• A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
• Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
• A “transfer of experiences… with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT”
• A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems

What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic “everything you’ll ever need” contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality – which may only crudely represent a customer’s specific needs – or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation – like any system – to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:

1. It must address the specific needs of its users.

2. Those needs are going to change over time.

Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their  ‘all-in-one’ systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming “data deluge”. Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.

Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you’ll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa’s Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.

Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.

As noted in a previous post  by Nic Archer it is anticipated that a third of organizations will in time employ a MOSS migration strategy and migrate to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. However in order to maximize organizational efficiency it is essential that all data is prepared prior to the SharePoint 2010 deployment to ensure a smooth content migration project.

By defining efficient taxonomy structures prior to deployment, organizations are able to more easily move content into their new SharePoint environment resulting in improved site architecture and navigation within the new site. This task in itself can involve a significant amount of work before data is ready to be migrated.  If this stage is not meticulously carried out, the value of the content in the new store will be significantly depleted.

The suite of MetaVis tools for SharePoint, now allows SharePoint administrators to reclassify content by assigning new metadata values and new content types during a migration, allowing organizations to migrate more efficiently. Even post migration, MetaVis allows administrators to bulk update metadata, should this be required, further enhancing the findability of data for the user.

With MetaVis, SharePoint administrators can utilize the new Term Store, to graphically re-design and re-architect their content, significantly improving search and discovery of local documents for organizations that are located globally.
By utilizing the capabilities of the new SharePoint environment through MetaVis, administrators will be able transform the web experience, lower the cost of ownership of content management and deliver error free automated migrations, while creating effective content structures in SharePoint 2010 – the ultimate goal for all SharePoint administrators.

As an experienced migration Consultant, I find it’s difficult to say when considering a migration which step in the process is most important. The success of a migration really depends on all the components of a solution working well from beginning to end. But it’s certainly true that a successful migration cannot take place without a robust means to push content into its new home, whatever that might be.

Since virtually every content management system (CMS) on the market is different, there is no silver bullet for loading content quickly and dependably. Each application programming interface (API) is different and can vary greatly in terms of quality style and completeness. Some may require a custom web service, deployed on the target environment and called remotely.

But this solution isn’t quite optimal. What if the client’s target environment is completely inaccessible for some reason? Perhaps the client’s security model forbids deploying foreign services. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 CMS circumvents the necessity to deploy remote services with its client object model. After getting your hands on the required libraries the SharePoint 2010 API is suddenly at your fingertips. Using this technique, a migration can be accomplished using a locally deployed custom service after supplying the required credentials!

While I found SharePoint’s client object model to provide a promising new way to connect to a CMS, I thought the API was incomplete and sometimes poorly documented. Luckily, the out-of-the-box web services packaged with MOSS provided the methods I required. I am excited at the prospect that more CMSs will start packaging up libraries that provide the tools necessary to connect to an environment with a remote machine. It simply provides a safer solution for the migration and one that doesn’t require deploying anything on the client’s machines! The big upshot of the client object model implies that projects are less likely to face resource bottlenecks because additional access to secure systems is not required. A smaller gap between the development and testing periods allows more time for refinements and a better quality migration solution.

It seems that Microsoft is leading the way in this regard.

Yesterday we announced our partnership with MetaVis to be the sole European distributor of MetaVis packaged software tools to help SharePoint Administrators. We will now provide tools that ease the daily task of organizing SharePoint environments for improved search, findability and e-discovery.

Our decision to partner with MetaVis was not made lightly. We evaluated a number of SharePoint migration solutions including Metalogix and AvePoint to ensure we would be providing out clients with the best out-of-the-box product on the market.

The most significant reason we chose MetaVis is because it was developed for the SharePoint 2010 market and therefore provides a more comprehensive solution. The MetaVis Architect Suite not only allows migration, but it allows SharePoint Administrators to graphically re-design and re-architect content so they get the most out of the features and functions of 2010: this is the major differentiation.

When evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint we recognized that they could do simple migration, but being developed for SharePoint 2003 and 2007 means they have only been adapted for 2010. The products will not necessarily give you solutions for re-architecting your content and definitely do not provide an easy to use graphical representation of the your content. And as a result, you’ll end up migrating all your content to SharePoint 2010 without the ability to take advantage of all the new features and functions within SharePoint 2010. You’ll need to buy more tools in order to get around this problem, costing you time and money.

The bottom line is that if you need a SharePoint 2010 migration solution and you are evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint, MetaVis should also be on that list.  We found it to be the far superior solution and we think you will as well.

You wouldn’t move house without taking stock of your content to decide what you need, what you can get rid of and what won’t fit in your new house. Or devising a plan for all the content to be cleansed, refitted and moved. So why would you do it with your enterprise content?