IBM Enterprise Content Manager and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) applications enable organizations to manage all forms of content and secure secure data with respect to compliance needs. The platform enables capture, activation, sharing, analysis and governance of unstructured data to lower costs and risk while improving efficiency.
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SharePoint
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Microsoft's SharePoint is an Intranet solution that enables users to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and collaborate across the organization.
Self-hosted IBM ECM Solutions are appropriate for any large organization with substantial internal infrastructure management teams and a commitment to training their staff. Other organizations should consider the Cloud based offerings.
SharePoint Document Management excels as a central repository for storing, organising, and retrieving documents. It supports version control, metadata tagging, secure access, and integration with tools like Power Automate. At our organisation, it's used for managing contracts, policies, and supplier documents. SharePoint Workflow Automation integrates with Power Automate to streamline approvals, gather feedback, and automate recurring tasks. This reduces reliance on email chains and manual trackers.
Speaking of IBM Case Manager in particular, we believe that just about every business process involving the effort of knowledge workers can be enhanced and automated using IBM Case Manager. If a process or set of tasks requires the judgment, decision-making skills, and experience of a knowledge worker, then the process can be configured for IBM Case Manager. If the process is dynamic and requires flexibility such that the business outcome depends upon the choices and decisions made during the process, then IBM Case Manager is the ideal solution for automation, tracking, and collaboration of such work.
With regards to Content Management, we are particularly fond of and adept at utilizing both IBM Content Collector, IBM Classification Manager, and IBM Enterprise Records. As business communications have changed over the last 20 years, the growth of digital content housed within the burgeoning storage silos located throughout a company's infrastructure has swelled to nearly unmanageable levels. This impacts them in numerous ways; from the direct costs associated with ever increasing storage, to the unknowable costs associated with the legal liability of content residing on their systems, to the lost opportunity of un-mined customer data residing on their systems. All of these impacts can be mitigated by the application of IBM Content Management and Content Analytics.
To me personally, I believe the greatest strength of products like these are their immense configurability. Depending upon the business requirements of the customer, systems such as those mentioned above can be configured in almost inexhaustible arrangements to accomplish just about any task that can be imagined - all to satisfy the needs and requirements of the demands of the business. From collecting email from mail servers and evaluating it for its context, not just it's content, in order to determine its worth to the organization, to creating File Plans for storing content in a smart repository which makes possible content lifecycle management and defensible disposal, IBM just does this better than any other products I am familiar with.
As enterprise and mid-market systems go, the price is highly competitive (especially when you consider what's included in the license). That said, this product is not accessible for small businesses as a self hosted solution. The "Navigator on Cloud" solution is much more accessible, but gives less control over data.
To get all the features, there are many moving parts. For large enterprises, this is no problem, and the cloud solution obviates most of these concerns.
We have too much invested at this point to do anything different and there are too many reasons as a company our size to keep it. We are heavily licensed out for Microsoft and have 12 years of SharePoint development baked into who we are. Extracting that as a tool at this point would be dumb and devastating. There are no like-kind competitors to it at an enterprise level that scale and integrate as well.
No usability issues reported. Individual teams also have allocated areas which replace legacy shared drives on local LANs. Access to Sharepoint resources is fully integrated with corporate Active Directory with additional two-factor authentication required for administrative users. Users have access to Microsoft Services Hub which allows you to create, manage, and track support requests while staying current on Microsoft technologies with access to select self-paced learning paths
The face to face training I received was on SharePoint Administration. It was rushed as there was a lot of information to cover and the application of the labs weren't that great either. I like to be able to relate what I am learning to what I am currently doing.
I like to learn at my own pace and online training allows for that. Additionally, you can skip through pieces of content that you already know or are already comfortable with. Microsoft actually offers great videos on their website for basic fundamental SharePoint Training. I have used these training videos in some of my own training sessions with end users.
Our relationship with IBM is long standing. We have been Gold Partners for some time and are viewed by many internal groups as their Go To partner for large ECM deployments. Most of our systems engineers hold multiple certifications as solutions developers. Our clients are national and international. The support we receive from IBM has been excellent and our partnership with them on numerous projects has been excellent.
The reasons for selecting MS SharePoint are: SharePoint provides ease of use and web design assistance and support SharePoint helps you schedule your content for publishing. enables users to share documents with external parties and offers a better internal structure of the content and better indexing and searching capabilities.
We've recently implemented Microsoft SharePoint access via iPads for our Template teams out on job sites. They can easily upload CAD / Laser files into Microsoft SharePoint for our production team to review in real time. Serious ROI when we don't have to wait for our Template team to get back to the shop!
We have multiple physical locations. Microsoft SharePoint allows users at each location to collaborate by working on documents simultaneously. Allowing us to solve multi-site problems & strategize on multi-site initiatives much faster!
We can also share key information with external partners. As long as they have a registered MS account (not necessarily an O365 account) we can share our information with them in a variety of ways. This allows consistent & concise communication with our partners.
