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Evernote 5 is here
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Posted by dan7000
Oct 13, 2013 at 06:52 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Dan, can you mention some EDM systems that you believe eventually might
>be scaled-down and re-packaged for small business or even personal use?
>Are you talking about the likes of Alfresco and Liferay, or something
>like Sharepoint?
>
>My view does not necessarily contradict yours, but I personally see ICT
>developments in recent decades having been led by the consumer market,
>even if the original technologies were developed for the high-end
>markets—including the military in the case of communications. In this
>context, I expect that the next widespread knowledge- or
>content-management system is more likely to be launched first as a
>personal / small team solution and then scaled up. It could be Evernote
>or Onenote for all I know—not to mention some cloud product currently
>being developed at a college dormitory.
I totally agree - desktop content management is likely to come from the bottom up rather than from complex systems being scaled down. When I mentioned that the future was in tools like ECM, I was not necessarily imagining any current ECM vendors figuring out how to reach the consumer market. In fact, since their business plans rely on pricing for big server installations, it’s really unlikely that any existing ECM vendor could adjust to reach consumers. It’s much more likely that as you suggest, small players will scale up, as discussed in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” I just think some of the features they’ll add as they scale will come from ECM.
As to your question which player could possibly scale down? I really despise most of the ECM products I’ve used for different reasons (bad interface, slow, cumbersome, inaccessible via mobile, etc) so I’d have to say none. I haven’t used Alfresco, though and it does look like it might be a contender, because it has pricing for small teams ($10/user) and mobile versions. But because of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Alfresco is unlikely to scale down too.
As far as what small apps could scale up, I would not bet on EN doing this. For many of the reasons Daly discusses, EN is just too locked in to one narrow vision to expand in this way. I think we all agree they are great at what they do but you can’t expect them to do anything else. OneNote kind of has already done this, with Sharepoint integration. But frankly I think Sharepoint is terrible at ECM. It does a great job at collaboration and Office integration, but it’s very difficult to search for documents in Sharepoint and it’s too difficult to add documents. Instead, I’d look to cloud-based document storage providers: dropbox, etc. Kim Dot Com’s Mega has strong security, an open interface and 50GB free for anybody. They just need to have multi-user logins and then somebody could add versioning, search , and Word integration as a third-party add-on and everybody would start using it. Dropbox already has good versioning but I don’t think any team features and of course terrible security. But they have terrific performance and a robust API. So if I had to put money I would bet on Dropbox or a third party addon for Dropbox.
Posted by 22111
Oct 14, 2013 at 12:27 PM
“But frankly I think Sharepoint is terrible at ECM. It does a great job at collaboration and Office integration, but it’s very difficult to search for documents in Sharepoint and it’s too difficult to add documents. Instead, I’d look to cloud-based document storage providers: dropbox, etc.”
To begin with, I know Sharepoint by hearsay, but that hearsay is not good. Most people who have to work with it, more or less hate it… well, similar things can be said about Notes.
Word will not die since most office people have to work in it, and thus do their private stuff with it, too, no extra learning requested for something other. MS can more or less integrate its stuff, and that gives them a big advantage.
I know “better things”, but at this mentioning of dropbox and so on, it occurs to me that yes, these dms are “better” for what I (and their buyers obviously) think they should facilitate and optimize, but their “cloud functionality” is not that developed.
I also become aware of the fact that a workgroup of 7 or 70 people might indeed be very interested in all their stuff/info being available from everywhere; it’s in larger corporations where security considerations only permit rather selected access to SOME of these infos from the road.
To my knowledge, there is no highbrow 7-people software available that does it all, at the moment, cloud-accessible software that’s not too expensive, will not permit real workflow into your laptop and from it, into the system, but perhaps some cloud-based software is much better at this.
It’s certainly not a coincidence that’s in the crm field that such software has become standard, considering for most corporations, crm info is just a subset of their overall info (and they are well-advised to leave it at that).
But security considerations taken apart, I see the necessity of “availability of, and access/input to everything from everywhere”. Here, perhaps another aspect comes into play: Corporations have in-house servers; the tinier the corporation, the more they are willing to have their data on a cloud server; some corporations have got their data within servers with some service provider who currently acts as it was in-house, but at his premises. With this transient realization, it becomes evident that “inhouse vs. cloud” is not that much a contradiction as it seems at first sight, so both the big players as well as successful cloud services providers will have the money and will provide the necessary efforts to optimize the tasks at hand, and in-house concepts and cloud concepts will merge.
But there’s an additional aspect, security again. Does anyone really and seriously suppose that serious corporations would place all their data in MS’ hands, especially after all we know about them, NSA and such - and btw, any professional knew all this many years ago, even without “Summer 2013” and its revelations to the general public.
On the other hand, many corporate leader would entrust their data with SAP, or some other specialists that seem to provide some guarantees - Google and such providing the guarantee that all you entrust them will be in the public domain, very soon.
So in the end, there will be groups of customers for such services: The 7-people corporations who don’t mind and don’t bother, and then those who need some guarantees, and here, it will be interesting to see if MS’ converging efforts (as they lately have done, their subscription models just being one part of all this) will be welcomed there. Since integration means integrated data storage, too, in their hands… and serious corporations could not want this. And this would mean that even if MS do better integration than they do now, this will put corporate data at risk, so I suppose people will search for alternatives, even lesser integrated. MS and such just have the wrong owners, and the wrong philosophy, so technical developments will not be accepted as easily as they might imagine: It will become more and more a matter of trust, and nobody has any reason to ever trust those people.
This being said, I see the necessity for traditional dms offerings to offer better laptop-on-the-road integration (and of course, with some AI detecting access when the legitimate laptop owner is held hostage, and his codes/thumbs providing data to third parties).