Microsoft and EMC: Managing Content Across an Enterprise
Microsoft and EMC: Managing Content AcrossanEnterprise
Realizing Enhanced Business Value by Using
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and
EMC Documentum
A Microsoft and EMC White Paper
Published: June 2007
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
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2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft and SharePointare either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
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Contents
The Microsoft and EMC Partnership
Building Business Value Across the Enterprise
Extending the Content Ecosystem
When Customers Have Choices
Using Documentum as the Primary ECM Engine
Managing Content for Key Business Functions
Expanding Application Functions
Managing Content at an Engineering Firm
Transforming the Sales Process
Empowering Sales Executives through the Content Ecosystem
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the Primary ECM Engine
Promoting Content Sharing
Customers' Options for Retention and Disposition
Records Management within Office SharePoint Server 2007
EMC Products for Archiving and Records Management
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum at a Global Energy Firm
Replacing File Shares
Tagging Documents as Content Types
Alternatives for Records Management
Content Archiving
Customer Choice through the Microsoft and EMC Partnership
Easy Integration for Enhancing Business Value
Related Links
The Microsoft and EMC Partnership
Building Business Value Across the Enterprise
To succeed in a digitally-driven marketplace, companies need to streamline their operations by structuring the flow of electronic business documents. Companies need to be able to leverage the capabilities of an environment for managing content across task teams, workgroups, departments, and multiple business units within their organizations.
Both Microsoft and EMC deliver platforms for enterprise content management (ECM) that are designed to meet these needs. Both Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and EMC® Documentum® provide capabilities for capturing content, organizing, and managing it in a systematic manner, rendering and distributing it as needed, and finally storing it for long-term retention and disposition.
Following an announcement in October 2006, Microsoft and EMC are proactively working with one another to enhance their customers' ECM investments. By integrating the capabilities of both platforms, the two firms can offer their customers added choices for creating, categorizing, and managing content within their organizations.
Extending the Content Ecosystem
EMC is avalued Microsoft partnerfor delivering ECM and archiving solutions. In particular, EMC has years of experience developing ECM and archiving products, and delivering them to thousands of public and private organizations around the world. Through this partnership, Microsoft and EMC are developing and delivering an enterprise-wide content ecosystem that provides customers with the ability to exploit the benefits of both platforms and brings ECM capabilities to business workers through the tools that they use every day.
Microsoft and EMC are working together to enhance and extend the content ecosystem, provided through the integration of their respective platforms. This means that customers who rely on Documentum can add additional SharePoint-based capabilities and user experiences to their environments. Conversely, customers who rely on ECM solutions based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 can add content management, archiving, and records management capabilities to their environments by using Documentum.
As a result, this content ecosystem leads to flexibility and customer choice. Both Microsoft and EMC customers can benefit from the integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum.
When Customers Have Choices
Customers have multiple options for deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum to solve their business problems. In making choices, customers may have questions about:
- When to leverage the capabilities of one platform or the other
- How best to empower business workers to do their jobs
- How to ensure effective governance across an enterprise
Customers can develop solutions based on various alternatives. On one hand, they can focus on Documentum as the primary engine for managing content, and rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide the interactive user experience. On the other hand, they can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the primary engine for managing content, and connect to Documentum as a repository for storing, accessing, and archiving content across an enterprise.
There is no one right answer. Much depends on a customer's business situation and operating environment. To illustrate the range of possibilities, it is important to characterize the usage scenarios for deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum as ECM platforms. What follows are several scenarios that illustrate some of the ways in which customers can exploit the capabilities of both platforms as a content ecosystem for enhancing business value.
Using Documentum as the Primary ECM Engine
Managing Content for Key Business Functions
Let's begin with the situation where customers have deployed Documentum to manage content for key business functions. These customers use Documentum to organize and store business documents and other kinds of content associated with developing, marketing, selling, and supporting their products and services. These customers rely on various business applications to manage and deliver the content that supports these functions.
Often, these companies need to expand the reach of their Documentum applications to meet new market requirements. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an attractive option for empowering business workers across an organization while continuing to leverage the business benefits that they realize from Documentum. In particular, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes collaboration and information sharing capabilities, useful for empowering business workers while also expanding the reach of Documentum as an ECM platform.
Expanding Application Functions
As Office SharePoint Server 2007 gains in popularity, many customers want to integrate it with Documentum. EMC Content Services for SharePoint provides customers the option to do so.
By using Content Services for SharePoint, companies can rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to interact with content that is managed by and stored within Documentum. Companies can easily customize the connections to Documentum by modifying the fields and values of predefined templates within Office SharePoint Server 2007, provided by Content Services for SharePoint. The Web services within Office SharePoint Server 2007 link directly to the relevant resources within Documentum. Thus, companies can extend their Documentum-based solutions, and deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 to empower business workers within their organization.
Managing Content at an Engineering Firm
How can a customer benefit from this kind of integration? As an example, consider the case of an industrial equipment engineering firm that depends on Documentum to win business among specialty chemical manufacturers.
Product engineers use Documentum to develop the specifications for precision equipment, including high-performance filters, pumps, and motors. Engineers query, access, and update content managed within Documentum. The equipment engineering firm categorizes and stores all customized product specifications within Documentum. Then, once the orders are ready to ship, the technical documentation group customizes product service manuals by retrieving product support information from Documentum. The end result is an unbeatable value proposition for the firm's customers—precision equipment together with product support information, tailored to meet precise specifications.
Transforming the Sales Process
As the engineering firm expands into new markets around the world, it must transform its sales process. The firm can no longer rely on time-consuming and inefficient procedures where sales executives first discuss requirements with customers, then follow up a few days later with additional questions from the product engineers involved in the design process, and finally deliver proposals for the customized orders. Rather, the firm needs to electronically connect its local sales staffs with product engineers who develop the customized specifications in the first place.
The company has recently deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 for collaboration and information sharing across the sales organization. The firm can now leverage its investments in both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum, integrate the flow of content between the two ECM platforms, empower the sales executives, and launch a new sales process. The firm extends the ECM capabilities of Documentum to Office SharePoint Server 2007 by using EMC Documentum Content Services for SharePoint.
Empowering Sales Executives Through the Content Ecosystem
Here's how the integrated environment works: Sales executives continue to rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 as their platform for collaboration and information sharing. But they also have additional capabilities that enable integration with Documentum.
Sales executives begin by using a specially designed request-for-quote (RFQ) form, based on a familiar Microsoft Office Word template, to capture the customization requirements for industrial equipment. Sales executives file the RFQs in predefined folders within Office SharePoint Server 2007. These folders are Documentum folders, a Web Part provided by Content Services for SharePoint that connect Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Documentum.
Specifically, documents stored within the Documentum folders are automatically transferred to Documentum as the underlying content repository. Documentum then logs the RFQs, validates them for completeness, queries the specification library to find examples of prior customized products, and forwards the resulting sets of documents to product engineers. As a result, these engineers receive all of the information they need to respond to the sales executives and develop the customized specifications.
The engineering firm can thus enhance its investment in Documentum as an ECM platform, and gain added business value from its investment in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Sales executives using Office SharePoint Server 2007 can collaborate with product engineers who rely on Documentum. By working together through a seamless environment, the two groups can more effectively win customized precision equipment business for the engineering firm.
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the Primary ECM Engine
Promoting Content Sharing
Let's focus on another scenario, this time where companies deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the ECM platform for enhancing enterprise operations. With the adoption of Office SharePoint Server 2007, companies seek both to empower business workers and also to manage content in ways that meet their operational policies and procedures.
Business workers rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 as they are involved in the ebb and flow of information sharing. They focus on authoring, reviewing, tagging, finding, and producing business documents. For them, Office SharePoint Server 2007enables them to do their job, both as they create, edit, and revise documents in a secure environment and when they publish content to target audiences.
Customers' Options for Retention and Disposition
Customers utilizing Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the primary ECM engine have the flexibility to choose the best approach to their document retention and disposition requirements, and thus to expand the archiving and records management capabilities of their content ecosystem. Depending on the circumstances, a customer can rely on:
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 for records management
- Documentum for records management
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 to manage certain sets of records and Documentum to manage other records
- Documentum for archiving content within an organization
Customers seek solutions that best fit their underlying information architecture and modes of business operations.
For customers concerned about formally managing documents over time, the solution they choose needs to manage content according to the firm's policies for retention, compliance, legal discovery, operations, and storage management. By working together, Microsoft and EMC provide customers with several options for archiving and records management.
Records Management within Office SharePoint Server 2007
As noted earlier, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes capabilities for records management. Within Office SharePoint Server 2007, documents and folders are categorized by their content types. Predefined content types can include metadata tags that identify when particular documents or folders need to be retained and maintained as formally defined records. Content types can also include a disposition tag, which consists of a date by which documents and folders should be removed from Office SharePoint Server 2007 and/or destroyed.
In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides Information Management Policy capabilities that are used to describe how different content types are managed. These capabilities can be used to define a records management standard. Policies can be applied to content types, folders, and lists. Once policies are applied, all content categorized as certain types or stored within certain folders will be managed in accordance with the records management standard, without any active user participation.
EMC Products for Archiving and Records Management
As part of its partnership with Microsoft, EMC delivers the following two products that leverage the capabilities of Documentum as the repository for content archiving and records management:
- EMC Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint, which moves or copies content from Office SharePoint Server 2007 and stores it in Documentum. Archive Services for SharePoint offloads systems running Office SharePoint Server 2007 and manages content according to predefined procedures and business rules.
- EMC Documentum Records Activator for SharePoint, which supports formal records management standards. Records Activator for SharePoint ensures that when documents are classified as records within a content ecosystem that includes Office SharePoint Server 2007, the documents can be transferred to Documentum as the system of record.
Both EMC products include the Web Parts and Web services that integrate Office SharePoint Server 2007 functions—including menu selections, dialog boxes, and item lists—with Documentum services and resources. The integration between the two ECM platforms supports seamless authentication and authorization. The integration includes options for single sign on as well as the capability to map security privileges from one platform to the other.
For customers investing in both ECM platforms, the end result is a user experience that combines the content management and archiving capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum. Customers can integrate the two platforms in a flexible fashion, and thus develop a content ecosystem that meets their needs for archiving and records management.
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum at a Global Energy Firm
How can a customer adopt Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its ECM engine for empowering business workers, and also rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum for content archiving and records management? As an example, consider the ways in which a global energy firm deploys a content ecosystem by integrating Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Documentum.
Replacing File Shares
To begin with, the global energy firm is adopting Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its ECM platform. The customer is replacing its far-flung collection of file shares that have been difficult to manage. Geologists, petroleum engineers, and other technologists, located in multiple sites around the world, are now using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to manage Office-based documents and other technical data sets.
These technologists access project-related documents and folders from their desktop and laptop devices to do their jobs. They use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to categorize and tag the unstructured information. They rely on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for document-driven workflows, in which documents are routed through the organization for reviews and approvals.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 manages all of the access rights and permissions for documents, individual folders, and groups of folders. Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes predefined sets of metadata, based on content types, which in turn helps to categorize and manage documents, lists, and folders by business policies and workflows.