Documentum vs SharePoint

I was looking for some info on how SharePoint stacked up against Documentum, and came upon Johnny Gee’s article titled Documentum vs SharePoint – Round 2. First I wanted to thank Johnny for a great post and Eric Crone (of ForeFront Partners LLC) for a good comment that greatly expanded the post. I learned a lot about Documentum’s eRoom. However, I saw a few things that were not quite accurate from the SharePoint perspective. This post is my response to some of the points in Johnny’s article and Eric’s comment…

 

From Johnny Gee’s article:

“Sharepoint (like eRoom) is great for collaboration.  However, once collaboration is done, the information and documents stored in Sharepoint site are siloed from the rest of the enterprise.”

My response:

SharePoint sites are not siloed from the rest of the enterprise. SharePoint has a set of rich, remotable APIs, including SOAP Web services and WebDAV, that allows the rest of the enterprise to interact with SharePoint content. Among other things, SharePoint’s records management API allows an organization to natively use an external records repository with SharePoint, if the organization does not like SharePoint records functionality (now DoD 5015.2 certified).

Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents

Black Blade Associates has just released a new black paper: Enhancing SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents. Lack of Virtual Document support is one the most common reasons consumers pass up SharePoint in favor of more expensive document management systems, like Documentum. The black paper describes how the docBlock Ascend appliance adds Virtual Document support to SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 have many new features, including new co-authoring capabilities in Microsoft Word.  While co-authoring is a great addition to Office 2010, co-authoring is not enough of a feature enhancement to SharePoint to make SharePoint a true document management platform. Organizations require the power of Virtual Documents to help SharePoint fulfill its potential for advanced document management.