ECM for the Masses
Wednesday, January 3rd 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has seen quite a bit of consolidation last year, with the acquisitions of FileNet, Hummingbird, and Stellent, while Interwoven and Vignette are rumored to be on the blocks as well. Consolidation is a corollary to maturation within any industry, and is usually accompanied by commoditization. The ECM industry is no exception to the rule, and a rapid commoditization process is taking place in the form of a flury of Open Source solutions — Alfresco being one of the most interesting, as well as some very interesting Office 2.0 alternatives. The one I am using on a daily basis is Koral. Here are the reasons why.
The main problem faced by most ECM solutions — or any piece of enterprise software for that matter, is that people end up not using them, and the most popular content management system around remains nothing more than a good old email client. Problem is, content management overlaps with knowledge management, and their respective benefits usually come from their intersection. Yet content found in emails is accessible only to the people who received them. Conclusion: email is not enough.
When evaluating an ECM solution, the first thing I take a look at is how easy it is for a non-technical user to get content in and out. If it takes significantly more steps than are required for searching an email archive or attaching a document to an email to be sent, I automatically discard the solution. And if it takes as many steps, or even less, I declare it a winner. Such is Koral.
I got my epiphany for this online service when I saw Mark Suster’s demonstration at the Office 2.0 Conference. In order to upload a document into the system, all you have to do is drag its file onto a drop-box that looks like a folder on your desktop. The document is then directly uploaded onto Koral’s server, its content fully indexed, and graphical previews automatically generated. Later on, you can add a more detailed description and additional tags to the document, either using a client-side interface — which I’m not using, as you would have guessed, or a simple form on Koral’s website. And because the hierarchical folder metaphor does not work past a certain point, Koral stores documents in a flat fashion with tags and workspaces, similar to Gmail’s labels and accounts.
In order to retrieve any content, all you have to do is type a couple of keywords into a search box, and Koral returns a list of relevant documents, based on tags, descriptions, comments posted by other users, and full-text indexes. As you would expect, Koral also supports versioning, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds that will notify you when new versions are created for the documents, tags, or authors you have an interest in.
Koral works with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, on both PC and Mac, even though the drop-box tool is not yet available on Mac (to be released in Q1). The service has also been integrated with Salesforce.com Appexchange. For more information, a detailed profile is available on the Office 2.0 Database.
Moving forward, here is where I would like Koral to go:
First, I would like them to release their prototype integration with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), as described on their Wiki. This would enable a separation of duty (SoD) that some corporate users might require, whereby ECM functionality is offered by Koral, but documents are physically stored within the customer’s own datacenter.
Second, I would like to be able to store a document into my Koral account by simply sending it as an email attachment to a private email account. This would bridge the gap with email, which is everybody’s content management system today, as mentioned above.
Third, I would like to see integration with other CRM applications, SugarCRM being first among them, and have such an integration done throguh an open API that other vendors could use as well. Koral has built such an API already, and it is expected to be released sometime this year.
Fourth, support for the emerging OpenID standard would make it easier for many people to add Koral as yet another entry into their Office 2.0 Setup. This one is a very low hanging fruit and I would expect support for it sometime in Q1 or Q2.
Sixth, I would like Koral to be integrated with both ThinkFree and Zoho, for online document editing. Currently, only in-browser previews are supported, and being able to edit a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document directly from the Web browser would remove a lot of unecessary steps from one’s workflow.
Last but not least, I would like some basic workflow capabilities to be added, either in the form of an integration with EchoSign. or through the embedding of a full fledged BPMS such as Intalio’s.
Let’s see how long all this will take. I bet we’ll get most of it before year’s end!
Disclaimer: Koral was a sponsor to the Office 2.0 Conference.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Ismael,
Regarding online document editing, it should become a reality in Q1 ‘07. We released our APIs recently for this purpose, and we have other applications already integrating this.
We’ll be glad to work with Koral on this integration.
S3 is extremely interesting I think for portable content management, for all the reasons above. We plan to implement it later in the year, but one challenge we found with our initial testing is the impact of a ‘speed tax’ from extra trips over the net. For us, it does impact the user experience, at least for now. I suspect anyone trying to grab documents extremely quickly may find this a small challenge. Would be interesting to hear feedback here.
Hi all,
I am Vice President of Products at Koral.
Firstly, thanks Ismael for the kind words and feedback.
Regarding Amazon S3, we have implemented and tested out our Storage as a Service architecture by integrating into Amazon S3. We used it to store files and flash previews for documents. I can’t say we had speed tax issues, but I suspect that if you used it to fetch content fragments, it would be noticable.
Our view on this is that if we can separate the storage layer from the application layer, we can offer alternative storage plugins. Maybe the most compelling is the idea of a hybrid SaaS service, where the application resides on the Internet and contains pointers to content files stored on a corporation’s own servers.
I’ll look into OpenID and the other feedback items you raised. I think that any application provider would love to offload the digital identity problem, especially when you need to integrate services from multiple applications.
Raju, I’ll follow up with you to learn more about your API. Sounds interesting.
Raju,
Thanks for the follow-up, much appreciated.
Best regards
-Ismael
Jason,
The performance issue you’re raising is an interesting one. I would love to hear more feedback about it. Please keep us updated as you’re doing more experiments in this area.
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] Ismael just wrote about ECM and where he thinks it needs to go, with some more info on Koral. We haven’t made the switch from our Windows file structure, but we’re considering it. I’ll post with an update if it rises to a priority where we act on it. […]
Ismael,
Can you turn IT|Redux to world hunger, cancer, or peace in the Middle East? It seems that you’re finding rapid answers to problems and issues.
Koral, on the basis of a very quick skim reading of their website looks just like what I’d want for the next phase of my plan for simplified standard documents. Whilst synchronization of storage between Zoho, ThinkFree, YouOS, my laptop, and my home server would be good, it is no substitute for a decent document management system.
I cannot endorse strongly enough your comments on ease of use. In my previous employer, I tried — along with others, it was by no means a solo effort — to get about 1,500 individuals in 7+ companies to use a common Document Management System (DMS). Because it involved all of 2 more mouseclicks, many (most) users did not like it and stored data in a whole range of places. One user left directories with his initials on every disc in the system, like a dog marking lamp posts! Of course the result is that instead of a consistent “one point of truth” which everyone shared, there were many, many copies of unsynchronized data. It doesn’t take a genius to see how this affected quality. Couple it with a “knowledge is power” attitude, and a reluctance to share, and you can see how “soft” human issues are the hardest to deal with.
I believe systems like Koral are the way to go and will be watching this closely. Incidentally, have I ever told you the “Andrew Baldwin theory” of how email destroys information ? Feel free to use it if it helps making a case for content management systems.
Suppose I work for company A and you work for company B. Now I have a proposal for a change, or a different way of working, and want to share it with you. I email it to you. Because it may be sensitive, I cover my back by sending copies to my boss, commercial department, etc. Similarly, you receive it and want to cover yourself, so also you it to your boss, etc. We now have many copies of the file. You and I may negotiate and change it, but what guarantee do we have that our bosses and commercial departments will even bother to read updates, let alone keep their versions aligned? Now, after days or weeks, our brilliant cooperative idea generates benefits, and companies A and B need to settle costs. Can you imagine how the mess of having different document versions will add to the confusion? Worse still, you and I will be castigated for not doing what others believed we should — such is life!
If we used a decent DMS, with adequate protection for confidentiality and an audit trail, the whole email problem is reduced to storing once, then emailing out references (URL) rather than copies.
Of course, given my previous reservations on ownership and management of stored data, I’d prefer to use my own servers rather than Web based ones managed by others, but that is a simple issue to fix when compared to hearts and minds of users.
Good luck with the product Tim.
-Andy
Andy,
Sorry, this is just IT|Redux.
You’ll have to find someone else for Life|Redux.
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] Original post by Ismael Ghalimi and posted by Mark Bean […]
Hi all,
We recently rolled out Koral for Salesforce.com in our instance. We are a small but complex organization, with personnel in France, Nicaragua, and distributed along the west coast of the U.S.
We considered a number of document management solutions, but Koral’s storage model (and, it must be said, their very intuitive integration with SFdC) easily made it the best choice for us. Additionally, we have had excellent interactions with Koral’s staff and executives, and have found them very responsive.
I think it’s safe to say that their publish/subscribe model, their folderless storage structure, and their support of multiple pointers to a single instance of a document make Koral’s model the obvious way forward. For our part, we’ve been surprised how readily everyone in our organization has adopted it — having been involved in previous rollouts at other companies, I expected a battle.
Understanding that the product is very young, we expect that functionality of the desktop client should improve rapidly — and can’t wait for that Mac version. Also, because our Nicaraguan users are on the edge of the connected world, we would like to see better support for shaky connections. But again, Koral has been very responsive to our needs, and we look forward to working with them this year.
Ismael’s second bullet in the original post — ability to email a document to Koral — would really help us out.
Keep up the good work guys!
Best,
-Brian Wenzl
blueEnergy
I work with Brian Wenzl (posted above) for blueEnergy. We are committed to the Salesforce.com (SFdC) environment for use as our Intranet, so we limited our search for a document management solution to applications that had integrations with Salesforce.com. We tried three available solutions:
1. The default SFDC document management system;
2. The DreamTeam document management system;
3. Koral.
Koral was by far the most intuitive and feature-rich application. Koral is a young product and is evolving at a rapid rate — we love what we’ve seen and look forward to what lies ahead.
The features I think we would most like to see added would be a Mac Desktop application, a way to synchronize the document repository to a local drive so that documents would be accessible in the event of a network failure (this is a very common occurance in our Nicaragua office), and a way to link directly to files in workspaces with “public access” permissions.
I can say that we have found the Koral team to be very responsive to our comments or questions, and a pleasure to work with.
Cheers,
-Mathias Craig
Executive Director, blueEnergy
Message to Mark Suster, Koral CEO:
I want to know your secret for developing such reference customers. The feedback you’re getting from blueEnergy is phenomenal. Please feel free to send more customers to the blog, for our readers really like this kind of first-hand experiences.
Cheers
-Ismael
How should ECM tools integrate with BPM tools, and what standards should exist in this space?
Roger,
Very good question. I’ll write about it today.
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] Following my recent post on the excellent Koral, several astute readers have asked what the integration points between Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) could or should be, and whether some industry standards were available in this intersection area. Here is a first shot at answering the question. […]
[…] Let me preface this post with a quick statement […]
Koral seems to be imcomplete when it comes to real enterprise document managment. docHarbor seems to offer a real enterprise solution, not just marketing and sales, that has pretty strong security features in controlling access to documents!
-Francis
Francis,
I’m sure that docHarbor is a good company. But there are many ECM companies that have large feature sets including Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Hummingbird, and Stellant, just to name a few.
We’re not trying to match all of these players feature for feature — that would be a waste of energy, and they would do a better job. We’re trying to address a much broader market need, and one that is not tied to just sales & marketing. The ECM space is worth $3 billion a year, and yet only 5% of all business users use any content management system at all. We believe that this is because today’s systems are not solving the problems of the end user in a simple enough way that leads end users to truly be productive. It is true that with docHarbor you can manage Sarbanes Oxley, and with Documentum you can manage the new drug submission process in the Pharmaceutical sector, and if you have those needs you should talk with these companies.
But for the rest of us that want a simpler experience with managing content, I believe that solutions like Koral (and others) will fill this market gap in the way that Salesforce.com filled a market gap not met by the overly complex Siebel offering.
Mark,
I couldn’t agree with you more that for personal use, any content management would do. When it comes to the enterprise, it is a very different story. I recall back in the early 80’s, I was in a consulting assignment with a petroleum company in Canada. One day, I was working in a VP’s office, and fully clothed RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers came into the office and cleaned out all documents from the VP’s filing cabinets. Later I found out that the tax return officer at Revenue Canada who checked the companie’s tax filing didn’t like the filing, and ordered a forensic audit of the oil company’s business transactions. It was not just that VP though, and documents were taken from the filing cabinets of the President, VPs, and Directors of the company. Two years later, there was no charge laid against the company, and all documents were returned. My point is that when you use the term enterprise, it means that you are subject to complying with regulations, be it SOX or equivalent!
Reasons that end users do not like ECM could be many. Personally, if the ECM does not index and categorize documents properly, I would not use it, just as simple as that. Moreover, if the online help is worse than the printed user manual, this would turn off users entirely. I learned this from a consulting assignment back in 1979 when I delivered a suite of turnkey Patient Registration and A/D/T systems to a teaching hospital. These systems were used by many departments, but the Patient Information Services Department was the primary user. As required by the Director of Patient Information Services, a system must be idiot proof, and she was right. Before a piece of data was updated in the MUMPS database, it was thoroughly validated. If a user did not know what the data field was used for and its valid set of values, s/he entered a question mark in the data field, and the system would respond with a comprehensive set of instructions on what to do on the right hand side of the screen of a VT100 terminal. Users did not need to consult a paper based user manual. I prepared one, but the Director of Patient Information Services never released it! She filed it in one of her drawers in her desk. By the way, the intructions were primarily written by the senior admitting clerks of the Patient Information Services.
In essence, when a software is truly an ECM, it must support regulatory compliance and security requirements. In general, software vendors, including IBM, are very good at overhyping their products’ capabilities, but fall short in delivering them. Sometimes, these are vaporware, as an Executive VP, Engineering of a cellphone services provider called it. Many practitioners in the IT industry misuse terms all the time, as I pointed out in this article about a year ago.
Cheers!
-Francis
Mark, Francis,
It sounds like the real market that Koral is going after is the Basic Content Services market, not the Enterprise Content Management Market. There is a writeup on BCS at Gartner.
-Joe
Joe,
Thanks for the URL of Gartner’s article. I agree with you that Koral is just a basic content management service, not truly ECM. ECM must be able to tag the security level of a document, which would be accessible only by people with proper security clearances. For instance, in-patient medical records are only accessible by the medical team that looks after the patient, not everyone in the hospital. The Toronto General Hospital (TGH) bought a package from a software vendor headquartered California. It was designed by a medical doctor, but TGH spent 4 million dollars to retrofit security features in the package. The package exposed every patient’s medical records to everyone who had accesss to the package! I believe that no hospitals would sign up to Koral’s services anytime soon.
Thanks again.
-Francis
Francis,
I’d love to know who the vendor was…
-Ismael
Ismael,
I don’t recall the name of the software vendor anymore, and I believe that it no longer exists. The package was purchased by TGH back in the earlier 80’s, which ran on Prime computer (another extinct species). The purchase of that package and money spent to beef up security were the joke within the hospital circle in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). It was the third attempt by TGH to get a suite of Patient Registration & A/D/T systems up and running. The first attempt took place right at the same time when I delivered a turnkey suite of Patient Registraton & A/D/T to McMater University Medical Centre (MUMC) at Hamilton, Ontario. TGH hired IBM Canada to deliver the suite. After 3 million dollars and 2 years, IBM only delivered a partial Patient Registration System, running on an IBM mainframe, with very limited capabilities. When it was up and running, the CEO of TGH called my boss, the President of the consulting firm for which I worked, to enquire how the McMaster project was going. My boss told her that the Patient Registration & A/D/T was and running more than 18 months ago. Anyway, TGH could easily get money to waste, as it was the largest teaching and research hospital in Canada!
In terms of security, MUMC has confidential admission for the members of Royal families in the U.K. or Middle East, or well-known dignitaries. In pre-admission or admission, the name of a confidential admitted patient never shows up on any terminal, unless you are a member of that patient’s treatment team, with proper security clearance. After a confidentially admitted patient is discharged, only designated senior medical clerks can do medical asbstracts of medical records for that patient. Moreover, the names of confidentially admitted patients never show up on regular daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports. Another set of confidential reports would track the movements of those confidentially admitted patients.
ECM would be an important system for organizations like hospitals — teaching hospitals in particular. Organization and retrieval of medical records for treating a patient or doing a piece of research work would require high degrees of relevancy, accuracy, and security to protect privacy and confidentiality. In essence, Basic Content Management is for the general masses, while certified ECM is for organizations that require extensive security capabilities.
Cheers!
-Francis
Francis,
Thanks a lot for the background information. Fascinating!
-Ismael
[…] Seen and Heard: IT|Redux reports: “I got my epiphany for this online service when I saw Mark Suster’s demonstration at the Office 2.0 Conference. In order to upload a document into the system, all you have to do is drag its file onto a drop-box that looks like a folder on your desktop. Scoble says: “Koral has a knowledge management system that is the coolest thing I saw at the SAP show recently.†[…]
I would love to see Koral also add more common Wiki features, like WYSIWYG note editing within the browser. Also, searching the content of email attachments seems fundamental, but seems lacking in Koral? Do people agree that Koral should get wikitized?
Rob,
I agree, integration with ThinkFree and Zoho would be great!
Best regards
-Ismael
VentureBlogalist, Ismael,
Message received and understood. Inbound email is in the works at the moment, and—fingers crossed—we’ll get working on the Zoho integration soon.
Regards
-Tim Barker
VP Product, Koral
I like how Koral has gotten away from a folder hierarchy, while most Wikis still support it. Inbound email is better than WYSIWYG since your email client is usually a starting point for knowledge management content.
[…] Today, many Office 2.0 vendors have embraced AppExchange and started to offer their services as extensions to Salesforce.com. Among them, there are a few I just cannot live without anymore: EchoSign for electronic document signing [review], Koral for content management [review], and Spanning Partners for data syndication and synchronization [review]. The desire to have these directly integrated within the hub of My Office 2.0 Setup is what convinced me to return to my first CRM love. Today, Salesforce.com has matured into a full-fledged platform, and it has become too difficult to ignore its appeal. […]
[…] Also don’t forget that you have to manage all of the content that’s generated by any expertise-gathering or knowledge exchange system. While it may sit in a low-complexity environment like a forum, you may eventually have to figure out how to choose a content management system if you want to put it all into something more complex like a portal or intranet (you may also want to read my previous post on how to choose what software you need). […]
After playing with for a bit, I think Google should buy Koral and integrate it with the Apps, with JotSpot, and turn it into a very efficient productivity wiki solution. I love JotSpot, and I think Koral is great—imagine the combination with Google Apps, and maybe a GTD and a project management solution.
Wow! Can’t wait.
-Ryan
[…] Koral: Koral [review] is a very powerful, yet easy to use document management system that can be used to store and retrieve any document. Documents can be uploaded onto the system by simply dragging and dropping files onto a desktop folder, then organized using a combination of tags and workspaces. Koral support full-text indexing, as well as direct previews for the most popular document formats, without the need for any third-party application. Koral is also fully integrated with Salesforce.com, allowing documents to be attached to virtually any Salesforce.com object. […]
[…] There is more than anecdotal evidence to prove that the model is working for a new breed of SaaS vendors, but some examples might help paint a clear picture. Two vendors that I am quite familiar with, EchoSign and Koral, each managed to sign tens of paying customers through the AppExchange in less than six month. Xcellery, which launched less than a year ago, signed their first customer last December, and got their first AppExchange customer this week. By any measure, this is fast. […]
[…] Three months ago, I wrote about Koral, one of the best online document management systems currently available. Today, Salesforce.com will announce that they acquired the company, and are using its technology to build Apex Content and ContentExchange. This acquisition marks Salesforce.com’s entry into the ECM market, but I hope Marc and his team won’t stop there. […]
[…] Sometimes the best acquisitions are those that don’t make headlines. […]
Hi all,
Fascinating posting and comments, I missed Koral at the Office 2.0 Conference, I must have been in another excellent session. Having taken a look it appears that Koral is offering what is often encompassed by the newest content management acronym — Basic Content Services (BCS, not to be confused in this space with Business Classification Schema), a term which now seems to be commonly applied to Microsoft’s MOSS 2007. Either way, neither Koral nor MOSS are ECM — well not by AIIM’s definition anyway.
However my contention is that ECM is a strategy, not a system. As noted by many posters, users don’t like DM / DRM / ECM systems when they have to contend with confusing web interfaces, the requirements for lots of metadata, records management retention periods, etc. So it’s about the business, and sometimes individual end users have to bite the bullet and do things that bring benefit to the organization, even if it means they have to spend a few minutes meta-tagging their documents. However, we absolutely should make it as easy and as usable as possible — and I can tell you Documentum, Livelink et al. need to apply to their ECM systems interfaces the creativity apparent in many of the products that have been presented at the Office 2.0 Conference.
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