Tonight we discuss ”the rise in importance of the channel and solutions providers” of document solutions. In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Let’s continue our discussion with the number 6 influencer in the DMS space this year:

6. The rise in importance of the channel and solution providers.  As the core technologies become viewed more as infrastructure, the capabilities of those who actually deliver and implement solutions becomes critical.

This is a critical role many solutions providers count on in order to drive professional services revenue. I would be interested in what others in the industry are seeing as there is definitely some truth in what John says, but not to the extend I would call it a fire sale just yet. The solutions providers’ business models still vary widely from company to company, as do the expected results.

I would propose there are two general schools of thought at the solutions provider level. The first revolves around the transitional copier dealer attempting to play in the arena of “solutions”. Typically a dealer will take on one (maybe two) lower-end, and easy to implement, file cabinet replacement. The professional services engagements are minimal, so they will typically train the connected technician or “IT Manager” to handle the installations. This allows them to maintain gross profit generally and many customers are quite fine with this presentation. All in all, it is not a predatory relationship, but it is definitely not a strategic relationship either.

The second is a provider who invests in an infrastructure of more highly trained engineers and sales staff. This is much more costly, runs the risk of side-tracking the current sales, and overall has the greatest risk of flopping. So why even risk this? Well, the profit margins can be substantially higher, the deals much larger, and the customers tend to be arguably longer-term. While this has the greatest potential for overall revenue generation, if serving your customer is not the focus, customers can begin to view their long-time provider of copiers, printers, and faxes as just another software company trying to turn a buck. Be cautious of this slippery slope.

Some dealers have found a hybrid model works, much like the territory and major/named account divisions in mid-sized to larger dealers. This is an equitable model so long as your staff is competent to understand the differences between the types of clients and their respective needs. In other word, it can be disastrous to attempt to force a lower-end solution into a more enterprise environment; conversely, it can leave a bad taste in the small business owner’s mouth if you leave them with an over-powered (and over-priced) solution.

In general, it should be expected to see a fair amount of professional services revenue as a result of a document solutions sale, and generally can equal or exceed the revenue of the software itself. But do not expect to see a run on the bank for phase two engagements at the outset. Most clients are content to renew their maintenance and call in for helpdesk support as needed (another key component to a successful document solutions program, by the way). This is understandable and to be expected as a business grows its base, and the base will most likely be a smaller percentage of total revenue if a company is to maintain stability of profit.

Outside of this, my contention would be that clients aren’t really pressing for phase two engagements because they were looking for a very specific solution, which was met (thinking tactically again). It should be expected that most companies will begin to ask questions about expanding between years 2-4 of a current solution if they are on-track with proper growth strategies. If not, then why not bring these questions up in your account reviews?

Interestingly, both customer and solutions provider have a choice to make: The former must choose whether to invest in a tactical solution to meet today’s needs or invest in a partner to help them achieve their goals today and tomorrow. The latter must choose which professional services model they will follow given their goals for revenue generation, customer retention, customer acquisition, and growth.

Everyone has an opinion about what is right and what is wrong. Only you know your business (customer or provider). So sit down, take a deep breath, and think about what’s important to you. After all, it is your business isn’t it?

I have been thinking a lot about whether DMS will have a place in the paperless office of the future, or will the likes of Google’s and Microsoft’s search engine tools replace the need for structured data? I mean look at WordPress as an example. I just write, tag my articles, and publish. I don’t worry about where they are stored because I can always go back and find them using search tools. This is a much different feel than our older HTML based websites.

Think about this… DMS for the copier dealer has been the “natural lead-in” from a copier-based sales mentality, or so the experts say. Presumably it is a bridged sales strategy allowing the those reps focused on hardware to feel a little like they understand they are still working with documents. Not saying it can’t be done, but that’s a tight corner to take. Most dealers are selling pages - a far different industry than selling software. The company I work with even struggles with this culture change on a daily basis as we blend into a consultative and strategic mindset. It is a slow progression we started many years ago, and the old habits still creep back in.

So what about the solution itself we are selling? Why has DMS or even CMS become such a buzz word? Does it have a shelf life or is it a technology that has a shelf life of 1 or 2 decades, much like the VCR tape?

I suppose it would have to depend on the applications you might expect. For instance, when we started our DMS conversion several years ago, we had the mindset to eliminate paper filing rooms and process paper documents much faster. It seemed like a wise direction at the time.

Fast forward a few years and enter a new ERP system, a new phone system, an overhauled infrastructure and even a second DMS suite (the first one couldn’t cut it). We now find that there is a need to store files, but there are considerably less paper documents to store. Why is this? Is the paperless office coming true?

Not so much. We have found ways to create less paperwork through process improvement and have also found that we don’t need to keep as much (there was a lot of duplication going on). And one of the most profound things my staff has discovered over the past 3 months is just how much of an impact a closely aligned ERP system can have on paper-reduction; paper doesn’t need to exist as much on the outside of our ERP system as it did in the other.

We are seeing some reductions in the arena of paper production, but does this in and of itself indicate the demise of DMS? After thinking and working with our solution there are 2 reasons I don’t think DMS is or will be dead anytime in the near future.

The rise of Business Process Automation (BPA) tools (sometimes referred to as workflow automation). For instance, the partner we chose had a vision 4-5 years ago that DMS was only a bucket, if you will. It held the documents you collected (paper or otherwise). Now they have launched their comprehensive BPA tools that we are expecting to have a significant ripple effect throughout our organization.

The second reason for DMS sustainability is simply lack of integration in the SMB between supplier, vendor, and customer. While there are systems that allow us access to more information than we ever had before, many times these disparate systems are unconnected from one another; we find ourselves moving from system to system in an attempt to pull information.

To be sure, technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day, and the price tag on integration doesn’t scare so many people as it did due to falling costs and better interoperability standards. But it is unreasonable in the near future to think the seeds of change will grow so quickly as to change the simple fact that to conduct business documents (electronic or otherwise) must flow between companies and customers. Just look at the sales process as 1 example (vendor quote, customer PO, vendor receipt, customer receipt, vendor invoice, etc.).

 DMS isn’t going anywhere in the near term. There are a lot of things that will change in the next decade, and I do not pretend to know what or how those changes will impact DMS specifically. I do know people will be people and software will continue to evolve and change. Unlike the VCR tape, software is simple a collection of electrons in a given order; they can be arranged and re-arranged innumerable times producing new code to solve new problems. As long as the people designing the code stay focused on the needs of their customers and developing trend in the document space, document solutions will remain relevant and needed to help people make sense out of the ever-increasing volume of documents.

Well, it looks like Scoble did it again. In his article ‘Why enterprise software isn’t sexy‘, Scoble sends a shot across the bow at Bill Gates, calling him out on whining about the lack of enterprise software coverage in the blogosphere. Albeit an older article, I found it compelling, so here are some thoughts…

Scoble asks:

Well, how many people in the world actually buy business software? … Instead, let’s look at the business of journalism or even of blogging. We’re paid to deliver page views. Advertisers call it “CPM” (cost per thousand viewers). Now, what’s going to get more of you interested? Consumer software that you actually have a role in adopting or purchasing or enterprise software where some CIO somewhere else in your organization decides on?

Scoble bemoans having to use SAP because some CIO in his ivory tower made a business decision and forced him to use it. Why not look at end user adoption as a key metric? Can you live by the subjective metric of customer satisfaction? Embrace this simple fact, when you really meet the needs AND wants of your customers, it becomes a game changer… it’s ultimately the greatest metric for true success (see my previous posting Are You Focused on What Your Customers Need, or What They Want?)

Scoble also asks:

Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?

Sexy? Some of the pundits are asking why make enterprise software sexy? That’s not the point… well not exactly. Maybe I’m sick in the head, but I think it’s uber-sexy to get paid well to help a business run well and keep customers (internal and external) happy!

My contention is business software doesn’t necessarily need to be sexy, but it definitely needs a PR make-over!

Tonight we discuss “the renaissance of capture.” In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Let’s continue our discussion with the number 5 influencer in the DMS space this year:

5. The renaissance of capture.  As the market expands into mid-sized organizations, there is untold untapped opportunity in organizations still reliant on paper processes. The expanding use of multi-function devices as access points to document systems creates all sorts of opportunities for solution providers.  But solution providers need to get out of the mindset that this is still a hardware business or a hardware sale.  It ain’t.

Indeed their is a renaissance afoot. However, it is not just within the small realm of capturing documents. Paper-based documents are still a very cost-effective way to transport information from one place to another. The printed page is increasing at an estimated 11% per year with 2006 volumes at somewhere close to 3500 billion pages (courtesy of Gartner via Jim Salzer over at DocuAudit International). However, I have seen no supporting data to further determine if these are simply reproductions of documents already available online or original documents to process and capture (although I have my suspicions).

DMS was originally intended to help structure the mess of file rooms, desktop clutter, and bloated file servers where otherwise structured data might be used (e.g. databases). A logical person might think DMS would be a strong contender to help structure the data with the rampant production of documents abound in today’s business. However, with increased potency of line of business (LOB) systems and the ever rising availability of digital originals, one can’t help wonder if the need for paper-based capture may be waning. On the flip side of the coin, dealers selling DMS are wondering whether providing a repository for the documents will allow people to let loose the purse strings and encourage generous volumes of reprints.

No doubt there are companies with rampant paper processes, and every dealer is anxious to know whether the pain is enough for them to buy one of their solutions, whereas business owners who have not adopted a DMS are asking why they would buy something when they don’t see a problem…

If the dealer is attempting to position a piece of hardware as the solution rather than taking into account a customer’s need for an over-arching strategy, I disagree with the opinion that the expanding use of multi-function devices as access points provides an opportunity to the dealer. However, I do see that DMS will provide an opportunity for dealers to reap the rewards of tying their hardware to a compay’s DMS or LOB system using middleware packages.

My only caution would be that dealers don’t become tunnel visioned in the process. John is clear to state “it ain’t” a typical hardware sale. True enough… so why even go in talking about the hardware at all?

In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Let’s continue our discussion with the number 4 influencer in the DMS space this year:

4. Trend #1, #2, and #3 add up to a dramatic decline in a collapsing price point for core document functionality at the desktop.  As a result, the market is exploding in two directions – across large organizations and into the mid-sized market.  From a cost vs. functionality perspective, this is the golden age of end users.  But we need to remember that the part of the industry focused on large organizations that need to integrate and standardize on an ECM infrastructure is vastly different than the part of the industry typical at the low end that simply is looking for a better solution to paper and/or a mess of network drives.

With the advent of great new focus on the end-user experience, John is absolutely correct in stating “… this is the golden age of end users.” Technology continues to increase its useful applications and simultaneously drop in price. Can I get an “amen” to that!

However, what is, and should be, compelling to the dealer is not only the decrease in the cost of acquiring the technology and the increase in usability, but a distinct divide that is forming between enterprise and SMB opportunities. This gives pause to many a sales manager.

Let’s face it, dealers are still talking about connecting copiers for crying out loud, and if you are in this category - well, you’ve still got a fighting chance. I’m not saying go out and start slinging software just to say you are. However, I am saying that you need to realize the network is what’s important, and PC’s and printers are simply devices hanging off the edges to render information.

That’s an interesting concept, I know, but the whole point of having a network is to exchange information and with the increased usefulness of software solutions, IT is being dispersed into the business units and being forced to use those long-overdue soft skills. This means the old saying, “there’s money where there’s mystery” just got taken out with your recycled paper… executives are smarter and more savvy than ever.

With this division of small and large business, the dealer community as a whole is ill-prepared to take the next step… let alone attempt to compete with the likes of IBM’s FileNet, Westbrook’s Fortis, or EMC’s D5… forget it. You aren’t prepared for the long sales cycles nor are you prepared for the gut wrenching decisions you will be forced to make. Let me tell you that just because you understand how to manage a large MPS client, this does not qualify you to take on IBM. Stick to what you know best.

If you typically sell to the SMB’s, and have a loyal base, you are in prime shape to help your valued customers step into the digital age - all over again (can I get another ‘amen’ to that!). At the very least you can help them reclaim file storage space and find documents more quickly. At best, you can become the new hero that made everyone in the company happier they know you. That’s a novel feeling for a copier jockey, isnt’ it?

Take advantage of the fact that the large players just don’t get the SMB market; EMC for instance thinks any business less than $500 million in annual sales is an SMB… Do you think they understand your $20 million dollar customers better than you do? Guard yourself against the declining margins of hardware, and show your customers you do more than try to sell them what’s in the warehouse that month. 

Show your customer you want to understand their business, their challenges, and their goals. Show them you actually care about their needs, and you may just find yourself in the unique position of being asked for advice. Quit talking about connecting copiers, and start talking about solving a business owner’s problems!

Tommorrow: We discuss “the renaissance of capture.”

Several years back, I know everyone always wanted more information and more data to make [insert adjective of choice here] decisions… Fast-forward a few years and just about everyone uses a search engine of sorts to find what they need in the mountain of data we are inundated with. What does that say about the amount of information we ingest on a weekly, daily, or even hourly? … ‘Google’ is now a verb!

I specialize in the managed print services (MPS) and document management solutions (DMS) spaces, and we always talk about discoveries as well as structured and unstructured data. Structured data is what most people are used to interacting with in the form of line of business (LOB) and database systems. Unstructured data is often the disparate file folders on servers and spread across the sea of corporate hard drives.

When interacting with all of the stakeholders in play at the various levels of our company and our clients’ companies, I often hear comments about how we need this information or should have that data. Sure, having the data is one thing, but is it meaningful to the company or our clients?

You see information is a tricky thing. If you don’t have enough the risk of making an ill-advised and/or unsupported decision is quite possible. However, there is an even more dangerous myth afoot in the world today; That is too much information is even worse.

Well how could too much information be a bad thing? Ever try drinking water from a fire hose at full blast? Exactly!

Our sensory perception allows us to take in quite a bit of information, process it, and make subsequent decisions or adjustments in order to achieve certain goals. Our minds can only handle so much information before it starts filtering out what it believes extraneous to allow us to focus on what is important. When I moved back from San Diego, the silence and still of a country night was maddening for a time; my mind had gotten use to all of the motion and action and took some time to ratchet back down.

With information hitting us from so many directions every day, to see a massive blob of numbers in rows and columns means absolutely nothing until our mind can process the information. So how do you dissect the data into manageable and usable information?

I won’t go into some of the more arcane methods of BI, but one easy way is to manage by exceptions. This goes back to having processes to manage your business. If you have flexible processes to manage your business you can watch for exceptions to your process and manage to those variances. Be cautious of the variances, and spend time investigating the ‘why?’ behind them; these will often lead you to discoveries of flawed processes. It is important to heed and fully understand the problems, and when realized move quickly and accurately to resolve them.

I got some interesting feedback from my recent post, Can Apple Take Over the Enterprise? Kontra, over at CounterNotions, seems to think there are no significant challengers to Apples huge marketshare gains in the recent months:

Who then can challenge Apple?Not Palm or Motorola (extremely weak and rudderless leadership); not RIM (no OS level hw/sw integration, little UI and very limited consumer market expertise)…

Our company has used Windows Mobile devices for several years, and has recently launched a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) offering geared towards our Sales personnel. I have found the UI for the BlackBerry to be better as a phone, but less rich as a PDA. We now run a blended strategy of both BES and ActiveSync solutions. It has been our observation that less technically-inclined individuals prefer the BlackBerry solution, whereas technically-inclined people tend to prefer the gadgets offered by a Windows Mobile device.

The BES solution offers stability, granular security control, and a superior phone experience to that of Windows Mobile devices. However, The Windows Mobile ActiveSync (same platform Apple is basing their Enterprise Roadmap upon) option is less costly and natively supports Outlook/PDA integration on the fly (without use of 3rd party solutions).

While I have not personally used the iPhone, if the Touch is any indication of how well a UI can perform, the phone must be a wonderful marriage of form and function. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile alike have met the needs of their customers, but have not followed a basic tenant, “technology should improve the lives of those it touches.”

The iPhone is realistically the device to match this tenant, but Apple has hooked their wagon to that of Microsoft, an arch-rival in the desktop arena. Add to this, ActiveSync is not perceived as being an enterprise-class solution by many in the circles I travel, but it has its place in the SMB. This will help Apple continue to gain marketshare, but not enough to oust RIM in OS version 2.0.

RIM hasn’t done itself any favors with its recent patent infringement suits and NOC outages. Microsoft and Apple were both quick to point out their solution did not have such weaknesses. Needless to say, RIM enjoys a dominant spot in the enterprise for a reason, it is a solid performer and is perceived to be much more secure (from this writers perspective this has been mostly true).

It was a bold move for Apple to forge into an extremely competitive space, and they will need to strategically innovate to continue their growth. For now, Apple is beholden to Microsoft and AT&T, but is seemingly biding its time, waiting for a choice opportunity to strike.

I predict Apple will continue to gain marketshare and will be able to better negotiate deals with vendor/partners once they have established themselves as a dominant player. The next strategic step for Apple and RIM might be to port the Blackberry agent across to the iPhone, just like RIM did with Windows Mobile; that might serve Apple’s need to push a superior hardware model while protecting RIM’s base of licensees. Could that pave the way for a merger or acquisition? Hmm… that’s definitely worth chewing on!

In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Being in the business of documents, I found the article compelling. Tonight we discuss the number 3 influencer in the DMS space this year:

3. Document and content management supplier consolidation driven by the movement of ECM to the infrastructure stack.  Enough said.

Wow, short and sweet. This is fairly cut and dry… While this references consolidation of vendors, however, I wanted to focus on the movement of DMS into the “infrastructure stack”.

Corporate IT departments build budgets around their expected costs for the year related to various business metrics, namely expected maintenance costs, on-going projects, etc. Infrastructure is a term used to refer to those pieces and parts of the IT landscape it will take to keep the day-to-day business operational.

Infrastructure can encompass various line items depending upon how a company wants to classify it, but for our purposes we will consider infrastructure to be an expected and budgetted cost each year. By moving the DMS solution to the “infrastructure stack” it now gets ranked right up there with the Exchange server or Line of Business (LOB)  system. That’s pretty important, let me tell you.

As a cost related to infrastructure you increase your importance to day-to-day operations and decrease the likelihood of being killed like a special project might during cost-cutting initiatives. Additionally, you might even consider that infrastructure issues are now assigned a place and priority within the corporate helpdesk ladder, so there is a technical person watching to ensure the solution stays operational (I could write a whole book on failed projects due to lack of ownership by IT).

With DMS moving to the infrastructure, it is getting more scrutiny with IT and business professionals; they are becoming more sophisticated. Your solutions can’t be second rate and must play with the rest of the infrastructure! Most CIO’s and Directors won’t even review a solution that isn’t blessed by their LOB vendor’s approved list, that is a HUGE strike against you already… unless you have strategies to work around this, like image-enablement without custom code (for instance).

Be prepared for a tougher sales process. The realignment is helping to drive some sales, but competition is stiff since every dealer out there wants a piece of the action… so if you aren’t careful and practice those solutional sales techniques you could become just another dog in the dogpile.

From personal experience, I can tell you that we are still seeing resistance to this realignment, but thankfully the education process is occurring and more executives see DMS as a need rather than a want. 

The key is to understand DMS is becoming more important, your customers are becoming more sophisticated, and (now more than ever) you need to show how your solution brings value to their business problem.

In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Being in the business of documents, I found the article compelling. Tonight we discuss the number 2 influencer in the DMS space this year:

2. The entry of “alternative” delivery systems for document and content capabilities.  Specifically the entry of meaningful SaaS players (for example, Spring CM) and Open Source players (for example, Alfresco).

I’ve said it in several posts, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is gaining momentum. This is not a surprise as the trend of outsourcing (the movie rental phenomena) really helped to spawn that SaaS industry as a whole (in my humble opinion). This model is extremely compelling for leadership, I can say from personal experience. I just reviewed the options for both an SFA and MPS solution for my company that ended up with the choice of using an SaaS solution rather than a traditional self-hosted model. I will tell you, in our industry, that was a fairly bold move. So what was it that swung the decision to an SaaS model?

Well, I can tell you it wasn’t really the price. In both instances, the licensing was actually a little more costly in the SaaS model. The biggest mistake most companies make, however, is they stop their due diligence at the “up-front” pricing. I dug deeper, and found that a cost avoidance strategy of not having to worry about hardware acquisition, maintenance, and upgrades really helped the total cost of ownership (TCO) case. I ran various comparisons to determine what I thought our real cost was going to be, and found in just about every case that an SaaS solution beat the traditional “you own it” model.

To really compare apples to apples, I had to look out over a 3 year time horizon. 1-2 years was much too short, whereas 5 years was much too long (the business can change too much in 5 years). I will tell you though, we expect these types of solutions to pay for themselves each year, so the typical investment scenario wasn’t as much in play. We are 6 months in to both solutions, so I will let you know how that goes!

Even if you are sold on the TCO strategy, one might think the SaaS model a slam dunk for the DMS - especially in the SMB market where acquisition costs and lack of in-house technical expertise are of prime concern. I think John is on to something here in that the case becomes more compelling each day, but there are some hurdles yet to overcome.

Primarily, the documents themselves are the major obstacle. For the same reasons discussed in yesterday’s post, how a DMS solution handles its documents is extremely critical. I would say this can be 1 of the most important criteria a decision maker can review. Predominantly, there are 2 models of how documents are handled within an SaaS solution: served up from the provider’s server or linked back to a local path hosted by the customer.

In my mind, this is the biggest hurdle of any SaaS DMS solution. We sell against this all day, and it is still a slam dunk for those seriously considering DMS. Why you ask, well the reaction times to render documents back to the desktop are tough, and the initial capture of the document can be timely as well. Lastly, be cautious of getting your documents back out if you choose to move to another solution. 

I saw something that has me really thinking in the February 18 issue of Information Week, a company called Azaleos. This is really intriguing, and somewhat of a hybrid of the typical “owned” solution and the SaaS solution. Azaleos is positioning itself to manage a companies e-mail, primarily Exchange. They ship you various configurations of appliances and take over the monitoring and upkeep of your Exchange environment.

The proposition is your IT staff can stay focused on delivering customer-enabling solutions instead of worrying about keeping the mail server going. What’s even better is you can turn off the service anytime you want, and you get a fully optimized e-mail environment to manage. Even though I don’t think anyone would want to do that after they have a taste, it is wonderful to have options and not feel locked in.

Once DMS reaches a similar point, I think this flavor will have a little more power behind the punch. Until then, do keep an eye on these players as they are quite formidable. If you are customer, definitely review these options, but be cautious of the gotcha’s. There are still some gaps the SaaS providers need to close, but they are closing fast.

Tomorrow, we will discuss number 3, and whether it’s good or bad for DMS to be part of your “infrastructure stack”, and just what is a stack of infrastructures?

For those of you in the “copier dealer” channel (although I’m loath to use this term) you are probably wrestling with the realities of Document Management Systems (DMS). In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM.

In this article John outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Being in the business of documents, I found the article compelling.  Not surprisingly, taking the number 1 spot was the momentum SharePoint is garnering. John goes on to say:

1. The entry of Microsoft SharePoint as a serious player in the document and records infrastructure marketplace.  This is one of the most important developments in evangelizing these technologies that we have ever seen. Suppliers and consultants will debate what MOSS can do and what it can’t.  But it won’t matter; it will spread like kudzu through the end user community.

John could not be more dead on with this. With the advent of SharePoint 3.0, whether it be the enterprise or SMB offering, Microsoft has taken root in the document space. We use it daily for both an Intranet solution as well as for dashboarding and workflow. Microsoft has once again bundled a core offering into the OS; since it is free to get started, meets some entry needs for the SMB, and is extremely compatible with the predominant desktop OS and Office suites it is indeed “spread[ing] like kudzu” (John must’ve been to South Carolina recently)!

While this solution is great for “evangelizing” the DMS/CMS market, I have quickly discovered it is not a very good DMS solution. Don’t mistake the fact that it has some wonderful collaborative tools and is extremely solid in ad hoc workflow solutions. However, SharePoint offerings are not true DMS’s in and of themselves.

Education is a tough thing here because many people don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to store a document within a database, as part of the SQL table record. It took me seeing what happens when you hit your first 20,000 documents stored - or worse have a client hit 3,000,000 pages 3 years early!

The performance takes a huge hit, and backups are a nightmare simply because you are handling 1 huge file instead of incrementally dealing with each file as needed. Think about your entire customer base calling you on Monday morning demanding a service call! You’re service team would crumble.

In closing, SharePoint will give your dealership the opportunity to talk to more customers about DMS, but if you don’t get there first and have an education strategy for them - you are the one that will get schooled.

My suggestion is to partner or acquire talent that can bring SharePoint knowledge into your company. It’s a technology that has its place - so you can either learn to use it to your advantage or see how much longer selling copiers with Paperport will last…

Tomorrow we discuss the entry of “alternative” delivery systems… what does that even mean?