With capabilities that include document management, content management, records management, and archiving; ECM systems often store the history of an organisation in the form of its content.
With escalating cost and dwindling skills, as we lose the IBM educated 'grey-haired generation' from the workforce, older ECM solutions are increasingly becoming a burden on today's modern enterprise with the challenges of operating such a service beginning to outweigh the benefit they bring.
Where regulation is a factor, some organisations are having to absorb eye-wateringly high costs of operations of their ECM solutions simply to stay on the right side of legislation or industry regulations despite Office 365 being an option, if 'done right'.
Moving to a service such as Office 365 is an attractive proposition to many organisations. Low cost of ownership, end-user familiarity, and the vendor consolidation opportunity (let's face it, most organisations around the world are in some part a 'Microsoft shop' whether they accept this or not) represents an opportunity to manifest the holy grail of IT delivery; doing more for less.
For services such as email, moving to the Microsoft cloud is simple. Plumb some stuff together, wire-up this and that, then shove your directory and mailboxes into the cloud. Pretty simple stuff for most.
For ECM services, including SharePoint on-premises, the migration path to the cloud can be much more complex. The original selling points of ECM solutions such as metadata management, retention, lifecycle management, and auditing can be hard to visualise as an endgame for many CIOs when considering the move to Office 365.
Try Hard
Microsoft has made huge strides forward with the functional baseline of Office 365, particularly with SharePoint and OneDrive, and how these services can leverage Azure capabilities to orchestrate and automate content management, but the more advanced functionality of the type provided by ECM solutions is still woefully lacking within the platform.
Frankly, this isn’t a surprise. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, right? Microsoft has to select items for its roadmap based on its determination of how to give the most benefit to the largest group of customers.
In reality, Microsoft has to pick functionality to deliver - it only has a finite pool of engineering resources after all - and this delivery roadmap will always be a hotch-potch that is driven by enterprise customer asks, product management whimsy, cool stuff, and fixes. That is just how product companies work. As customers and partners, we have to accept it.
A positive aspect of Microsoft's onward march for Office 365 is in the context of cost. I hear folks in the consulting world bleat about the cost of functionality delivered by Office 365 E5, EMS, or Azure Premium programs but, in reality, most of the nay-sayers just don't have true enterprise experience. I find that these neg-ferrets (thanks Adrian!) are used to working with smaller customers where complex systems are less common and the context of software is in it being a tactical commodity as opposed to being something strategic.
Sure, $50 per month per seat seems expensive when compared to $5 for less functional SKUs, but Enterprise-class IT has never been cheap. ECM systems often run into the tens of millions of dollars per year and they don't offer all the estate-wide security, compliance, audio, and other capabilities brought to the table with premium Office 365 SKUs.
What does this mean, in reality, for a customer considering moving from a legacy ECM to Office 365? Everybody engaged in a migration is obsessed with activity at the tactical edge ('how will it actually migrate?'). What are the considerations for the move though? Long before content starts moving there are a number of wider concepts you need to make peace with.
Let's take a look.
Compromising the Future
Organizations (and their management) will have to accept that the major benefit of moving to Office 365, lowered cost, comes only if you can accept compromise on functionality. The reason that cloud (or 'cloudified') ECM products are popping up is that some organizations simply cannot compromise on functionality and so 'cloudify' their solution, reducing the cost-reduction benefit (of getting rid of a dedicated ECM solution) but still garnering some of the benefits of being in the cloud.
This 'cloudification' may take the form of running their current ECM platform in Infrastructure as a Service ('IaaS') or by having a 3rd party (such as Alatrio or RecordPoint) alongside their Office 365 content.
If you can't rationalise the functional compromise of moving to Software as a Service ('SaaS') or don't want the change associated to 'cloudifying' into IaaS, then the cloud isn't for you at this time.
It really is that simple. You will have to continue with the high cost of ownership associated to your existing platform, not forgetting that you will inevitably, have to move to the cloud at some point, given the direction of travel of many of the vendors.
