MSFT: EMC and Microsoft Form New Enterprise Content Management Alliance, Extend SharePoint Server With Content, Compliance and Archive Solutions

EMC Corporation and Microsoft Corp. today announced a new enterprise content management (ECM) alliance aimed at helping to enable organizations to become People-Ready with their compliance, regulatory and other critical business data. This alliance enables information workers to take advantage of the Microsoft® tools and applications they use every day to access and contribute to the critical business processes available in their ECM infrastructure. As part of this strategic alliance, EMC will introduce a set of new content and archiving products that enable tighter integration between the industry-leading EMC Documentum ECM platform and Microsoft solutions and platform technologies. This announcement builds on the existing EMC and Microsoft alliance

EMC will bring to market new solutions that seamlessly integrate the EMC Documentum platform with multiple Microsoft solutions and platform technologies including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, SQL Server™ 2005 and enterprise search solutions. Microsoft provides content management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007 today. With this new alliance SharePoint users can take advantage of the advanced ECM capabilities of the Documentum platform. Information workers will be able to access the Documentum platform natively from within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office system, enabling users to leverage the power of the Documentum platform in areas such as advanced records management, business process management, imaging and rich media from their preferred Microsoft applications.

“In response to demand from our mutual customers, Microsoft and EMC are working together to help enable customers to take advantage of the ECM capabilities across Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the EMC Documentum technologies,” said Kurt DelBene, vice president of the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. “By expanding on the rich integration between Documentum and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, we are offering customers more choice and control over the management of their business information.”

“For years, customers have been demanding seamless integration of their working environments with enterprise-level content management capabilities such as content classification, retention, workflow and security,” said Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice president and general manager of Content Management & Archiving at EMC Corporation. “Today’s announcement makes this integration possible and is yet another milestone in EMC and Microsoft’s collaborative efforts to deliver enterprise-class solutions that address customers’ most critical business information requirements.”

“At Dow Corning, we’re a large EMC Documentum customer with approximately 150 content management applications across our organization and a premier Microsoft customer,” said Ann-Marie Horcher, senior specialist at Dow Corning Corp. “We’re pleased to see EMC working closely with Microsoft to integrate its content management capabilities directly into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We believe this is the right strategic direction, as the success of content management is ultimately determined by our end users’ ability to access the content and capabilities necessary to meet their business needs using familiar applications.”

These solutions from EMC will allow manual or automatic archival of content from SharePoint repositories to a Documentum repository while keeping content accessible and searchable from within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. By archiving content from SharePoint into Documentum for long-term retention and management, organizations can help their information workers meet compliance, content utilization, and storage optimization policies and procedures, all from within the familiar Microsoft applications they use every day.

“There has never been a better time for customers to realize the value that the Microsoft platform and applications, combined with partner solutions, can provide. We know that great companies like EMC are committed to providing our customers with the highest-quality end-to-end experience,” said Robert Bernard, general manager of the Global ISV Group at Microsoft. “This strategic alliance presents an exciting opportunity for our joint customers to get the most value out of their investments in both EMC’s and Microsoft’s technologies. Together, we are thrilled to be able to provide a world-class user experience built on Microsoft software with EMC.”

EMC has also extended the Documentum platform to support Microsoft SQL Server 2005. With this new integration, EMC Documentum customers can now use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to achieve a better application experience, improved performance and more application reliability. At the same time, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 customers can leverage enterprise-level content management capabilities including process and repository services for increased functionality and flexibility in collaboration, automation and security.

“Enterprises are faced with increasing regulatory complexities — including new changes in the federal rules of evidence — even as their confusion increases about the right tools to manage content,” said Toby Bell, research director at Gartner Inc. “To mitigate risk and simplify decisions about better content provisioning, an ideal combination of basic and higher order content services functionality would marry specific parts of each type of offering to allow for strategic content control. 2007 might be the year when content governance policies and the supporting technology finally become effective in better managing out cost and complexity, while managing in availability and accountability.”

At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2006 in Orlando, Fla., Oct. 8–13, Microsoft and EMC will demonstrate integration of the EMC Documentum platform and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 at booths 602 and PS-2. EMC will deliver a presentation on Oct. 10 from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m. titled, “Extending Microsoft Office and SharePoint with EMC Documentum.” More information about Gartner Symposium/ITxpo can be found at http://www.gartner.com/it/sym/2006_/sym16/sym16_home.jsp

Pricing and Availability
EMC Documentum platform support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is scheduled to be available this quarter. EMC Documentum Content Services for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 is scheduled to be available during the first quarter of 2007. Prices vary by configuration. More information about these and other EMC software products can be found at http://software.emc.com