The ECM spotlight

Announced in October, Dell’s $67 billion bid for EMC is likely to disrupt the status quo for both companies– but what does Dell stand to gain from the purchase? As a traditional server hardware vendor, Dell seems to be angling to take a bigger piece of the hybrid cloud and data center infrastructure market. With EMC, it stands to gain several pieces of technology real estate, including high-end storage products, RSA Security and a stake in the privately held VMware. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, ECM expert Ron Miller discusses likely goals of Dell-EMC deal, along with likely challenges facing the new partnership, going forward. The post Will EMC deal give Dell an edge with data center infrastructure? appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

The pending sale of EMC has raised questions about the long-term prospects for the company’s enterprise content management platform, Documentum. Announced in October, the $67 million purchase bid by Dell is expected to shake up the EMC portfolio, and ECM expert Ron Miller shares his perspective on the topic in this ECM Spotlight podcast. Miller discusses prospects of Documentum perhaps changing hands again after the sale, and also touches on the challenges the platform has faced in trying to keep up with newer, more agile cloud competitors. The post What does the EMC sale mean for Documentum? appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

Customer journey mapping is all about evaluating consumer/company interactions, an eye toward making improvements and providing the best possible experience. While typically associated with customer relationship management (CRM) software, that same methodology can help companies alleviate enterprise content management (ECM) pain points and improve efficiency, according to ECM expert Geoff Bock. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, Bock discusses the value of mapping worker experiences with ECM software, saying it can provide a more frictionless experience in the workplace. The post Customer journeys provide template for improving workflows appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

Long seen as a static repository for company information, enterprise content management (ECM) software is undergoing a transition toward playing a more active role in enterprise collaboration, suggests contributor Geoff Bock in this ECM Spotlight podcast. This trend reflects growing interoperability between enterprise technologies, but it also signals changing the dynamics between front-office-and-back-office technologies, with the potential to create data volume and identity management issues, according to Bock. The post Interoperability revamps ECM dynamics between front and back office appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

The proliferation of mobile devices is driving Web experiences to become more intuitive and interactive. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, content management expert Geoff Bock explains how location and other contextual factors can fuel more meaningful mobile interactions. “There will be many activities we will be involved in to create these ‘micromoments,'” Bock said. “To identify just when something important is happening, then push an alert to let people know that something important is happening. And when you get an alert, you want to be able to dig in and get more information.” The post Mobile content strategy must embrace location, context appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

Increasingly, companies are recognizing that for business operations to function efficiently, the applications that underlie those operations need to work together. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, content management expert Ron Miller discusses how the cloud is helping to integrate and streamline business applications. “When we start to digitize these processes, we can streamline them,” said Miller. “And we can start to think about how they work together, work more in a cooperative way than proprietary software in the past has. It’s an opportunity to reinvent how we work.” The post Using cloud content management to generate business opportunities appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

EMC’s content management strategy shifted course when the company decided to sell off Syncplicity, the cloud-based file-sync-and-share app it bought with much fanfare only a few years ago. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, content management expert Ron Miller suggests the union wasn’t a good fit, saying EMC is enterprise-focused, while Syncplicity is a user-focused. “It wasn’t a good fit for EMC as an enterprise company,” Miller said. “EMC salespeople don’t normally sell user-focused software, and they had a really hard time with it. They didn’t know where to put it or how to deal with it.” The post EMC shifts content management strategy with Syncplicity sale appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

A centralized repository for content is only useful if you can locate the contents. And as company content repositories continue to grow, they are finding it ever more difficult to sift through their corporate resources to find what they’re looking for. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, content management expert Ron Miller discusses some of the challenges facing enterprise search and how they might shake out over time. “The enterprise search industry has developed, but it hasn’t been as satisfying as Web search,” said Miller. “It works great on the Web, but it doesn’t work so great in enterprise search because your house is smaller.” The post Overcoming the challenges that dog enterprise search appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

When it comes to enterprise file sharing, organizations are coming to recognize they need something that’s both user friendly and secure. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, content management expert Ron Miller discusses how enterprise content management systems have matured to where it’s easier to balance usability and data security. The focus has shifted to the end user and what the end user needs,” Miller said. “[Previously], the software was designed to be big and monolithic and huge installs and big management of the application itself. … Over the last five years, there has been an effort to remove some of that complexity. … We’re shifting the conversation [to] ‘How can we access the content, distribute the content in a way that’s a lot easier so they aren’t using these kludgy systems to do it.” The post ECM software aims to balance ease of use and security appeared first on The ECM spotlight.

Social media can help stir digital presence and online exposure, but many organizations find that their social presence is really about enhancing exposure in the physical world as well. In today’s world, that can mean responding to Justin Bieber on Twitter and then watching it go viral. In this ECM Spotlight podcast, John Yembrick, who heads social media at the NASA space program, talked about bridging the gap between the organization’s presence online and its physical presence. And about the time a Twitter conversation with Justin Bieber helped NASA earn some new fans. The post NASA uses social media to bridge digital and physical experiences appeared first on The ECM spotlight.