Inspired in part by Johnny Gee's recent post.

There's that old saying : If you can't beat'em join'em, and I think it's safe to say that, for now, that's EMC's direction when it comes to SharePoint.

Have a listen to Chuck Hollis, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC. (His mention of Documentum and Sharepoint is between minutes 2 and 4, if you don't want to watch the whole clip.)

"We've got to do this now," he says, referring to the Sharepoint/Documantum  Integration. "This is not a nuisance. It's a lever point for our entire organization."

And if you want to see if the walk matches the talk, consider the changes in position Andrew Chapman has made since September; he's gone from pointing-out Sharepoint's weaknesses to becoming the EMC/SharePoint evangelist. He took on the title of "General Manager of the SharePoint Technologies Group and Senior Director of the Compliance Applications Groups for EMC's Content Management and Archiving Business Unit" shortly after the ARMA conference. (See what happens when you invite people to buy you a drink Andrew? You not only become "enlightened" but extremely verbose when conceiving job titles.)

Now I suspect EMC has many reasons for the Microsoft embrace. "It's what's best or our business our stockholders and our customers" is the generic responsible response publicly-traded companies make. It's important to note, however, that what's "best" for EMC, as a whole, may be different than what would be "best" for Documentum, if it were still a separate entity. (Consider that EMC recently announced that it will be delivering "mission critical information infrastructure for new Microsoft platforms".)

That deal must be worth a little change!

There is at least one thing on the radar that EMC is doing that's good for Documentum. They've made themselves visible at this week's sold-out SharePoint conference where Chapman will be a presenter.