When I began recruiting in the Document Management space more than a dozen years ago, "document control" was a relatively common term. After attending a few Sharepoint presentations over the past year (and watching Bill Gates's keynote at the SharePoint 2008 conference on Monday via the web), "collaboration" seems to have emerged to be the word in that world.

Sharepoint, according to Gates, is "based on a vision of letting workers share information in a better way." *

Enterprise Content Management, according to Wikipedia, "is the technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists."

On the most superficial of levels, it seems like one technology (SharePoint) is about the creation of content/documents by groups of people and the other is about storing the result(s) and keeping it safe. What happens in the "in between"? Which technology dictates the critical lifecycles and workflows? Can these technologies be used in concert to produce a winning ROI (which is somewhat jokingly referred to as "Risk of Incarceration" by traditional ECM customers.)

If you haven't played with SharePoint, ease of use is the real sell to the user. You can create cool looking personal and collaboration sites for your projects rather effortlessly.

So how is Sharepoint being used by companies? According to Gates:

Although the majority of SharePoint implementations currently exist at the departmental level (some of which IT some departments don't even know about), Kurt Delbane, a Sr. VP, pointed to a few that were orchestrated enterprise-wide from the likes of Ford, General Mills,and Viacom. From a "Show 'N Tell point of view they were rather impressive.

I saw little in these two keynotes that appeared threatening to the likes of Documentum and OpenText as ROI (Risk of Incarceration) product providers; in fact, I was more intrigued by Gates' bullishness on search technologies than on Enterprise Content Management in the Document Management sense. ( But I didn't hear the MOSS Life Sciences or Compliance teams pitch their stand-alone solutions at this conference.)

*For anyone who's interested, here's the text of Gates' speech.