Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Over at the AIIM Blog, John Mancini shares some SharePoint observations. I was struck by the last one:

I am convinced that in the end analysis, “the elephant” is not really SharePoint.  I think “the elephant” is really the “mainstreaming” of this industry -- the drive of content, document and records management to the desktop and the drive of these technologies into the mid-sized market.  SharePoint is a big part of this drive, but it is not the only part.  The drive of the IT infrastructure players to either enter or expand their presence in this market (and the resulting consolidation) is reflective of this movement of ECM technologies into the mainstream.  The greater attention being paid to ECM by the big consulting guns and the services arms of the infrastructure players is reflective of this.  So too is the emergence of credible open source players like Alfresco.

It's not just the emergence of open source alternatives, but the growing market of add-ons. By their nature add-ons have a smaller market than the software they add-on to, so they only emerge after the host application has enough of a foothold.

With our announcements of Vizit and the ClearView annoucements, it's clear that the ECM add-on space for SharePoint is heating up and is further evidence of the mainstreaming of using SharePoint for ECM.