You heard it here first.

Google has announced that it has extended the indexing and search capabilities of its turnkey Search Appliance 5.0 to the major Enterprise Content Management systems on the market today. Namely, EMC's Documentum, IBM's FileNet, Microsoft's SharePoint, and OpenText's Livelink.

You should be able to download the enterprise search device's 5.0 software for FREE either late this week or sometime next week. Support will be provided via Connector modules which are included.

Not included, according to Matthew Glotzbach, Google's director of Enterprise Products, is Google Apps; a service that Google provides to enterprises in a private, domain-oriented context and one that can be used to create a variety of documents that organizations might want indexed such as text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and HTML documents. But that's just for today... If Google says it's coming in a later version, it's coming in a later version.

They want your webtop (your interface to the web, not only the Documentum product.)

And for my Open Source fans, Google open sourced the framework under an Apache license.

Why did Google open source the code? So that developers in different enterprises can tweak it for their specific environments in order for the search functionality to integrate efficiently.

As an aside, the pundits are pondering what moves like this by Google will have on proprietary ECMs. Should documents be created and stored as HTML vs. a proprietary format? Google thinks so, but they know the answer is "not quite yet."

"Clearly ECM's aren't going away anytime soon," Google's Glotzback says in a podcast, "there's so much legacy data trapped in them."

But what if you had a greenfield opportunity?

Technorati Tags: Documentum, OpenText, EMC, ECM, FileNet, Enterprise Content Management, SharePoint, Google, Open Source, Apache