• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Alfresco Consulting – Documentum Disruptor #2

You are here: Home / Alfresco / Alfresco Consulting – Documentum Disruptor #2

August 19, 2011

We posted an article last week on how Alfresco and SharePoint were Disrupting Documentum.  The term disruptor is from the Innovators Dilemma business book and it relates to how difficult it is for one company to continue technology innovation over time and newcomers disrupt the industry.  In a phone discussion with one of the responders, we discussed how consulting resources (like ourselves) are assisting in that cycle. This post will discuss how TSG and others Alfresco consulting firms are accelerating the disruption of established ECM tools like FileNet or Documentum.


 Integration of open source and commercial tools 

A major differentiator for Alfresco Consulting resources is the integration options surrounding open source. Integration includes the addition of PDF manipulation, annotation, migration, scanning, web services and all of the other common add-ons for ECM that come free with Alfresco. With commercial vendors like Documentum or FileNet, many times a client has to buy these add-on solutions from the commercial vendor as part of a platform or suite offering.

Alfresco Consulting resources aren’t limited to working with the purchased components and instead can use pre-existing integrations from other companies or developed internally. Supporting the open source model, consulting resources can build their own add-ons and contribute them back to the Alfresco source or release and support them (as TSG does) as open source.

Alfresco Migration Utilities

TSG’s most popular open source download is OpenMigrate. Originally developed for and certified by Documentum, OpenMigrate has been added on to over the years to provide the ability to move to and from a variety of ECM tools including FileNet, Documentum, Alfresco and SharePoint. Built as an open source migration framework, OpenMigrate can work either configured “out of the box” or, given access to the source code, tweaked for difficult migration activities.
The ability to move from one repository to another disrupts the established player in that the client isn’t “locked in” to an established solution. Over the years, our most frequent ECM to different ECM migration activity has been migration away from FileNet to Documentum. As discussed in the previous post, Documentum ECM disrupted the image system success from FileNet. For those familiar with the old FileNet systems, many of our migrations have involved OSAR Optical Jukeboxes (built by FileNet) that have been disrupted by the increased performance, speed and price of magnetic. We are seeing a large demand by Alfresco Consulting resources for migration to Alfresco from a variety of established ECM players.

Web Services and third party offerings

One key to our solutions that is common with other third part Alfresco solutions is the ability to isolate the front-end application from the back-end ECM repository. TSG began developing our open source web services for Documentum, OpenContent, before Documentum released the DFS (see related DFS post). OpenContent provides the ability for TSG to develop solutions for EITHER Documentum or Alfresco. Cross-repository open source tools include:

  • High Performance Interface – for search, retrieval and folder transactional systems. Solution has been deployed for a variety of Documentum and Alfresco customers.
  • OpenAnnotate – for annotating PDFs in a web browser
  • ActiveWizard – dynamic Forms and Workflow
  • OpenOverlay  – for dynamic PDF header/footer and signature pages. Based on opensource iText.
  • OpenCapture – not all open source, uses a low cost scanning plugin to provide a more cost effective scanning solution.

Alfresco fully supports CMIS providing for a variety of other interface options as well.

Partnering differences

Open source provides for a community of developers rather than a commercial model that pushes for the solution from a the “suite” of a vendor. Alfresco provides the support for consulting firms that isn’t always there from commercial vendors. Examples include:

  • Alfresco Partners are encouraged to provide additions to the Alfresco product set as well as add-ons.
  • Alfresco Sales Reps are encouraged to understand partner’s offerings to better service the client.
  • No Internal Competition –Alfresco Partners don’t have to compete with a software sales rep that is selling software but also trying to sell consulting services against a partner. A sticking point of relationships with traditional vendors has always been “who gets the consulting work”. This can set up a no-win situation for the Partner who either gets the work (making sales rep mad) or loses the work.

Ex-Factor

As pointed out in our EMC World Recap, many of the stalwarts partners of the Documentum/Momentum vendor exhibit chose not to participate in the expo this year. While all the consulting firms are all still around, a logical question would be “what are they doing instead of Documentum?” During the Alfresco sales kick-off meeting, we were surprised to learn how many (almost 50%) of Alfresco partners were current or past Documentum partners. These partners are in the unique position, if viewed as vendor neutral, to advise clients (and disrupt Documentum) in regards to Documentum versus Alfresco or SharePoint, particularly on the client’s current implementations.
One major benefit of being a consulting firm is the ability to quickly switch or add services or product lines just by adding more people or conducting more research on the products. With Alfresco, we have found:

  • a better consulting sales model (not competing)
  • a better long-term cost of ownership for our clients (from last week’s presentation)
  • a better community of developers (leveraging open source)

In thinking about consulting as a disruptor, SharePoint Consulting has many of the same strengths listed above including

  • they don’t compete for services with their partners (although the partner universe/number of Microsoft partners is huge)
  • long-term cost of ownership (given bundling of Microsoft)
  • community development (not open source but strong amount of developers)

In a quick review of many partners websites, most, if not all, also offer either Alfresco or SharePoint or both.

Summary

In addition to some of the long-term cost of ownership factors discussed in the previous post, Alfresco and SharePoint are also disrupting Documentum with innovative consulting arrangements with their partner and network of development resources. Consultants experienced in Documentum are able to leverage their understanding of other technologies (Alfresco and SharePoint) to advise clients on how to leverage the disruptive nature of these other offerings.

Let me know your thoughts and comments below:

Filed Under: Alfresco, Documentum, Documentum Web Services, ECM Landscape, FileNet, Migrations, News, OpenAnnotate, OpenCapture, OpenContent Forms, OpenContent Management Suite, OpenMigrate, OpenOverlay, Product Suite, REST API, SharePoint

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Third Annual TSG Client Briefing – June 3rd – 2010
  • Alfresco 2013 Summit – Recap
  • Documentum Client Briefing – Final Agenda – June 7th – University of Chicago Gleacher Center in Chicago
  • Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2013 – TSG Recap
  • Alfresco Consulting – Consulting in an Open Source world
  • Documentum – Top 12 Tips
  • Documentum Open Source Software
  • TSG Open Source Product Plans
  • Next Generation ECMS – Architecture Thoughts
  • Documentum – Momentum EMC World 2014 Recap – Some bunts, hits as well as some swings

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT