Microsoft Enterprise Content Management White Paper

Microsoft have updated the white paper detailing their direction for ECM within the Office "12" product. The white paper provides:

Overview of ECM Drivers and Challenges

Keys to Successful ECM

• Maximize User Acceptance
• Meet Diverse Organizational Needs with a Unified Solution
• Minimize the Burden on IT

Enterprise Content Management from Microsoft

• Key Components of Microsoft's ECM offering
• Document Management Capabilities
• Records Management Capabilities
• Web Content Management Capabilities
• Forms Management

The whitepaper can be found on the Office online web site.

Office 2007 Packaging and Pricing

As reported by Stefan. Microsoft have just release pricing and packaging information regarding the new Office 2007.

MCMS SP2 Article List

Andrew Connell has compiled a pretty comprehensive list of MCMS SP2 related articles. The list can be found on his blog.

MCMS Roadmap and Future

Via http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2005/12/30/508244.aspx

This is a very interesting read from Arpan Shah, Product Manager for MCMS at Microsoft. He talks about the future of MCMS and its alignment with the SharePoint product.

"...we are building CMS functionality on top of Wndows SharePoint Services (WSS) "v3". CMS and SPS, along with a lot of other great functionality, will be one integrated set of technologies built on top of WSS "v3". The Office Server investments built on top of WSS "v3" are codenamed Office "12" SharePoint Servers..."

Arpan examines the different experiences for different CMS 2002 roles in the Office "12" timeframe for End-User/Subscribers, Content Contributor, Template Designer and IT Professionals

He also discusses some of the new features, such as a more complete API and enhanced Workflow. The workflow functionality will be built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) for which WSS "v3" is the host. Enterprise Search will also be integrated with the CMS functionality in Office "12" and greater support for multilingual content will be in the base product.

Being built on top of WSS "v3" means that CMS will be able to access a rich set of feature. Several example are Single Item Security, Recycle Bin, RSS, Page Layouts ("template") can have workflow and Web Parts.

In the mean time, if you are a CMS 2002 customer today, Arphan suggest that you take a look at the Reusability Whitepaper as well as his posting on start getting ready for Office "12". You should also contact your account manager/Microsoft representitive for more information on the futures of CMS.

Web Content Management in Office "12"

Gerhard Schobbe, Group Program Manager – CMS Team, has written a very interesting and informative article on why CMS is being aligned closer with SPS. He states that the CMS team will be posting tons of details on what is actually in the product, who would want to use the feature set and in which scenarios, how things work under the hood (starting with the ‘page rendering model’) and occasionally even why. They’ll also go into details on how the migration from existing, CMS-powered sites will work and how SPS sites will benefit from the enhanced publishing features.

http://blogs.msdn.com/wcm/archive/2006/01/21/515880.aspx