A year later – where is Documentum and Sharepoint today?

Someone just recently posted that its been almost a year since I have initiated the discussion about Documentum vs Sharepoint. Robin East’s comments were pretty insightful and a year later, it seems to be right on the mark.

At EMC World 2007, I felt that EMC was promoting its Content Services for Sharepoint as a way to respond to existing Documentum customers when they started to ask about Sharepoint.  As of today, there seems to be only 1 or 2 dedicated sessions to Sharepoint.  Hopefully, there will be more sessions as we get closer to the conference date.

I personally feel that Documentum is in the process of re-defining itself in the market place. Since March Madness is around the corner, I would like to say that this change is analogous to a basketball team losing all of its seniors last year. I believe in the next two years, we will see EMC Documentum re-invent itself by truly embracing the services architecture and spend less time developing specific products.

We have seen the evolution of Webtop and how feature rich the application has become. Like Microsoft Word 2003, there seems to be too many features exposed through the UI that most users do not use -80% of the users use only 20% of the features. With D6, the clutter has been reduced by the introduction of presets functionality. I think this is a stop gap measure.

The reality is that there is no magic bullet application that will work for everyone. EMC Documentum needs to return to its roots and focus on how to best support its developers and make it easier (and thereby cheaper for clients) to produce feature rich applications in a minimal amount of time. I think TaskSpace is the first step, but I feel that EMC Documentum needs to put a lot more R&D into developing this platform and expand its current line of web/product services.

I dont for see revolutionary changes when D6.5 comes out later this year, but I do believe that 2009 will be the test on whether the new EMC Documentum can really challenge Sharepoint’s advances. Till then, Sharepoint will keep on making inroads into ECM market.

Any other predictions for 2009?