Salesforce.com has hardly put a step wrong in its short history, transforming the CRM and sales force automation space, becoming the toastmaster for on-demand software, and creating the model for transparency. It's fast-growing and even loved by customers. And now it’s heading for enterprise content management.
Salesforce said earlier this week that its next quarterly release will mark its entry into the ECM sector. CEO Marc Benioff referred specifically to Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint for what he suggested was a failing model of how to do ECM. His plan is to take web consumer technologies and apply them to content management so that a person searching for a file could view it by criteria such as ‘most comments’, ‘most popular’ or ‘most recently viewed’, for example.
As Benioff noted, this is straight out of the YouTube playbook and the move has a certain attractive simplicity. However, I’m not overly confident that Salesforce will have the same effect on ECM that it has had on CRM.
Despite Benioff’s characteristic denigration of Microsoft, SharePoint has already shown that you can have an attractive front-end for managing content, while companies like Documentum have a ton of solid experience at the more complex end of the ECM spectrum.
Salesforce's vision of a pure browser-based view of an enterprise’s assets will necessarily be incomplete even if one were to accept his implicit belief that document users will be happy to apply ratings they way they do on the latest music videos.
Salesforce’s content push might offer up an attractive alternative to search software, or for managing information culled from sales or service calls, but that will only take the firm part of the way to a true ECM system.
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