Another job, another question! The people I’m working with have decided they’re going to need some sort of Project Management System. They’ve been looking into it and researching it, but haven’t made a decision yet. Is anyone out there familiar with this sort of thing? Does anyone have any advice or suggestions? We’re considering Microsoft SharePoint 2007, but it does have some competition.
Thanks, as always, for your help!
Content Management or Project Management? Your title said one thing, your post the other, and they’re two entirely different topics.
Excuse me. I meant Content Management Systems. I seem to have had a brain fart (at least I didn’t do it in a restroom) and it’s too late to edit.
Sharepoint is a collaboration system. Content management is best handled by something like Documentum (if that is what you mean by content management). Brainiac4 will be by shortly for the Enterprise Content Management discussion…
Aha, someone has lit the Brainiac4-signal. 
As Dangerosa pointed out, Sharepoint is really intended for collaboration, although it does offer some content management functions. Content management can mean a lot of different things – if you can give me some idea of what problems you are trying to solve, it will help to narrow things down.
My own experience is mostly with enterprise-class content management systems in an ecommerce context. I have spent a lot of time with Fatwire Content Server (we just upgraded from 4.0.3 to 7.0.3 last week, which was a big deal). I’m currently working on an implementation of Documentum for product content management. And we previously used both Vignette and Interwoven, so I have some familiarity with those, although I am a couple of years out of date.
Tony Byrne maintains a pretty useful resource for content management systems over at CMSWatch. There is a semi-annual conference on content management technologies run by the Gilbane Group that I have attended in the past, and to which I have sent one of my team members. Next one is early December in Boston, and if you are trying to decide between options it’s a good place to go and talk to the vendors.
Content management might mean web content management, document management (library services such as versioning and access control), workflow and process control, or something else… it’s kind of a broad subject.
For pure web content management, there is an open-source option (there are many, actually) called Drupal that some of the folks I work with swear by.
If you are after web content management for online there are a lot of options, depending on what technology you’re using and how large the site is. If you need an ecommerce module that can change requirements (PCI Compliance and data handling).
Do you want to go Open Source or commercial? For Java, most of the people I know use Interwoven or Blue Martini. PHP varies - they tend to build custom, but I’ve had some success with Exponent for small sites. ASP.Net I can’t make any suggestions - they’ve all been custom.
The other thing to consider is the tech level of the people updating it. Some CMS do require HTML knowledge to use. If they are non technical and just editors, you want something that can work without them coding.
I’m a bit wary of Drupal due to the security fixes that some of the modules and versions require. A starting point to check any CMS security is Open Source Vulnerability Database which will give you a starting point to check how much security patching a CMS will need.
Just wanted to echo this. I have some experience with several systems; it all comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.
Siege, are you coming back?
Excuse me. Life got busy and I was away from the thread for a bit. Here’s what I’m up against.
We have documents stored all over the place, including some in file cabinets. We want to get them into one, coherent, searchable system. We’d like our project managers to use a consistent set of templates and have a consistent file structure from project to project so that, say, expense reports will always be in the same subfolder, regardless of the project. Management wants to be able to pull up sets of reports quickly and easily.
SharePoint’s not the only option we’re considering, but I think they’d rather go commercial than shareware and we have an adequate budget. I’ve only just started with the company, so I’m still getting a feel for what they want and what the current state of things are, so please bear with me.
Thanks again, and please accept my apologies for taking so long to get back to you.
If you need to do document scanning and archival (going to a paperless environment) then that’s just an e-filing issue and perhaps Sharepoint would work for that, but you’d be making use of only a small part of Sharepoint’s capabilities. There’s a lot of manual labor and indexing involved no matter how you look at it.
If this is all related to projects, why not use MS Project Server or PlanView Server. Both allow upper management to look at their projects across the entire business spectrum (rather than just in “line of business” silos) as they relate to budget and do roll-ups to high level executive summaries.
No worries, Siege. 
Sounds like a good application for Documentum to me. It started as a document management system, and some of the advanced capabilities, like what they call “transactional content management” seem like things you will grow into. It is definitely not cheap, but I’d say it’s worth exploring. One feature that you may appreciate, depending on the size of your team and level of interest in learning new stuff, is that you can configure Documentum to appear as “just another network drive” in Photoshop, QuarkXPress, InDesign and the like.
As Patty O’Furniture points out, dealing with your historical backlog may be a really big project. Depending on the value associated with that, you may want to consider not converting the backlog, and just declaring that as of this date the system changes; old stuff is in the filing cabinets, new stuff is on disk.
Many of them (like Documentum) are expensive - we’ve done this project several times and have never been able to justify the ROI.
Here are some other potential requirements.
ability to accept OCR files (for scanning in all those documents)
Searchability (at what level - Sharepoint can read inside Office docs)
Access control - how easy, what level of granularity - does this thing need to protect confidential information.
You want this to put the documents in the right directory - how do you envision that happening - the user assigns attributes? Remember, classification is only going to be as good as your users in classifying - if they can’t get it in the proper directory now, making them put in attributes to get it there probably won’t help.
Archiving, aging and deletion - there is a word for this that has fallen out of my head right now.
How much collaboration do you want to do? Sharepoint is great for collaboration, but collaboration means asking a whole 'nother set of questions.
If you need to scan in the original paper documents, I agree with everyone above that you need a document management system that also has content management capabilities. At a previous job, we used the Stellent Content Management Server (CMS) - Stellent’s a local company that has since been bought by Oracle (so I guess it’s now the Oracle CMS, but whatever).
Echoing the expensive idea - the Oracle CMS probably cost north of $50K, and we only implemented half of it. It also had a pretty steep learning curve to set up and administer (although not insurmountable. Still, spending the cash on a couple of contractors might have made things easier for us in the long run.). But it’s dynamite if you need to track a lot of documents; this thing could handle millions of pages, no sweat.
At that same job, however, it should be said that they used Sharepoint for all of their project documentation - justifications, meeting minutes, budgeting, specs, that sort of thing. And they did have it set up so that each project used mostly the exact same file structure as another. If you’re going to be primarily working with documents that a number of different people are going to be updating and changing, Sharepoint’s not a bad way to go. Just know that it emphasizes collaboration over control.
In my workplace we’re trying to get our heads around this broad subject, so we can decide what our needs are before buying (or making) solutions. Can you recommend a book or website that explains the general concepts? A little bit of tech jargon is OK, but it’s the business side of things we need to teach ourselves about.
Sorry, E. Thorp – work consumed me. I think the Gilbane Group and CMSWatch, which I linked above, are good starting places. There is a CMS Professionals group as well, although I am not a member so I can’t tell you how active it is.
Thanks for the tips.
We use Stellant too. I’m not an IT guy, but it works great for plain vanilla content management. But programming a complex workflow is a pita, apparently.