What's up in the ECM space? Who's in, out, lame, back, reborn?                                                              

EMC, Documentum, Sharepoint, Facebook, Google, SalesForce.com.in no special order.

But first a disclaimer- This is not a Top Ten List.

For those of you who don't know, I write on the subject of WORK for a major newspaper and the editor insisted that we call our listof 2007's best books "notable." So, in keeping with his guidance, here's my list of what's worth noting in the ECM space at the moment.

1) Microsoft Sharepoint.
It's becoming omni-present -more than 17,000 companies have purchased 85 million licenses. Are they all using it for ECM? Probably not, say industry analysts, many are using it for basic document management. Still, Microsoft has won more renewals than it's lost. Industry analyst Gilbane says Microsoft has "one impressive foothold. Each new version of SharePoint has become more functional and has enjoyed deeper penetration into large organizations. SharePoint 2007 is now a significant ECM platform with a great deal of functionality and well established partnerships with key complementary vendors." And how have would-be competing vendors like EMC responded to the Sharepoint invasion? "They've bent over and offered themselves up as repository," says an Industry insider who wanted to go on record without being named.

2) ECM as Infrastructure.
Here's how EMC defines itself: "EMC Corporation is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions." Like EMC, Oracle, Alfresco, OpenText and Microsoft all offer basic ECM capabilities via middleware. Will Google compete in this (the infrastructure) space? "Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group told the New York Times. "They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable." He said that he believed that Google was the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.

3) Archiving will become a prime focus for ECM vendors
ECM vendors will begin to switch their attention to archiving strategies for the large volumes of data that is no longer relevant to the organization's current activities. Analysts see HP moving in to challenge the big boys like EMC, IBM and Open Text.

4) Compliance Go-goes Global
US companies are beginning to come to terms with Sarbanes-Oxley, but regulations are now taking shape globally. Europe is developing new records management software standards, called MoReq2. The rest of the universe will undoubtedly follow.

5) Open Source ECM
Alfresco zooms past proprietary ECM software vendors by integrating with Facebook, Google and now Quark. And what's more. Alfresco's CEO John Powell mentioned that there are now over 29,000 working installations/deployments of Alfresco around the world (50 countries, 20 languages).

6) Web 2.0 Social Networks go Enterprise 2.0
Will Facebook and LinkedIn rule at the office or will the social graphs generated by Lotus Notes and Outlook give established vendors like IBM and Microsoft the edge? Will Google out-open Facebook  with Orkut and OpenSocial and encourage integrations with existing ECM applications?

7) Will Inbox 2.0 generate a more intelligent business lubricant.
Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, says Yahoo is working on "Inbox 2.0." And if they're doing that, so is everyone else. What's the win? The e-mail service displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you.

8) Enterprise Search becomes socially-tagged, easier to navigate, and empowers collaboration.
Oversimplified, a collective, accessible "we" is more intelligent than a brilliant "me". Ideally, you don't even have to get along with the people you share with, you just need to deposit our content (and they need to deposit theirs). The analysts are saying things like: ECM systems support content federation and content re-organization that is tailored to each member of the audience. Finally, integration of all the content assembled for a multi-year, multi-million dollar effort places experts and content in the same contextual framework. The potential for maintaining these contextual and human relationships for easy navigation and finding the right expert within large team is invaluable. The big win? Navigated search is a path for discovering content you might have missed but for exposure to other colleagues' paths of discovery. This takes research support to a new level and opens the door to serendipitous experiences with potential for innovation greatly increased.

9) ECM as SaaS.
Industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe says that SaaS options give you 80% of what a traditional ECM vendor will provide, but at a lower up front cost, with less hassle. If you can live with the 80%, what's not to like? The release upgrades and support are somebody else's problem and maybe (maybe) they have more collective expertise than most internal teams. And while SpringCM and Xythos are the apparent leaders in the SaaS/ECM space, SalesForce.comis what we hear people talk about. And interestingly, there's at least one ex-Documentum (in its pre-EMC days) employee responsible for the firm's Document Management effort. How well will it integrate with other applications and how readily will it be adopted? We'll find out in 2008.

10) By Year End 2008 MOSS Will Disappoint
Yes, we began this list predicting Sharepoint's impending omnipresence. And yes, we've heard customers talking about it being the magic bullet for everything; in fact one Pharma plans to dump Documentum (their R&D folks think it's too complicated to work with) and go Sharepoint full-throttle, enterprise-wide. Does MOSS have the same enterprise-sized compliance features as Documentum? Can MOSS meet eDiscovery standards? Read what Andrew Chapman has to say.

And whether he's right, or not, at least a few MOSS users will be disappointed. Why? Because when you buy the sun and the moon, that's what you expect to get, and last I looked they were still in the sky.