EMC and Microsoft Form New Enterprise Content Management Alliance

This should be interesting to watch. Hat tip to Guy Creese over at Pattern Finder which is were I saw this first. He has a nice post that discusses the announcement made this morning by EMC and Microsoft.

I have been predicting the SharePoint ECM train since November 2003 when I wrote "Document Management For Free" for AIIM E-DOC Magazine.

And, yes I agree that Microsoft is going to partner with anyone that will help them increase sales and revenue regales of their loyalty or perceived commitment to Microsoft. A good example of this was when Microsoft made Open Text their 2006 Global ISV of the Year (Microsoft lingo for Independent Software Vendor) at the World Wide Partner Conference.

I wrote about how this looked to someone familiar with the ECM market and astute enough to read between the lines since Open text had stood side-by-side with Oracle a month earlier at their launch for Content and Records DB.

Let’s see how deep the integration with SharePoint really is and also how the Microsoft field positions EMC: As a partner or competitor?

And what I really would like to see is for EMC to integrate Documentum in the other direction and provide a way for customers to leverage the Documentum workflow and BPM capabilities to workflow enable SharePoint managed documents. This capability is something I have been telling vendors like FileNet and EMC (Documentum) to embrace and provide for years. Let’s see if EMC goes for it.