Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Content Management

Executive Overview
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is traditionally thought of as very expensive to license and
extremely costly to roll-out and scale. Additionally, it often requires expensive hardware and
supporting software in the underlying stack.
For a long time, the ECM industry was dependent upon a model based on high cost and complexity,
with the vendor controlling the customer through proprietary power. ECM pricing models are often as
complex as the product offering, with literally thousands of options for customers to consider when
pricing a product configuration. Customers are not clear on what extras are required to deliver a
working system, what fair value is based on usage, or what rights they have regarding software use.
As a result, it is difficult for customers to understand and control the total cost of ownership of ECM.
These hidden extras pricing models continue because they are an important source of revenue for
some enterprise software companies. However, the lack of transparency on true pricing has major
implications when an audit occurs.
Fortunately, there is now an alternative. The most scalable collaboration sites and websites in the
world now run on open source software. These Web 2.0 sites have commoditized the scaling process
and changed the way content is both accessed and mashed-up. In short, given their requirements,
they would not be affordable or economical without open source. They have changed the economic
landscape of both ECM and Reliability, Availability and Scalability (RAS). Open Source allows
companies to do more with less and have a solution that focuses on:

·   Lower Cost  A low cost, subscription model with minimal upfront investment that can be
   driven out of operating expense as opposed to capital expense;
·  Greater Simplicity  Rapid deployment to deliver immediate business value; and
·  Greater Customer Choice  Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reusing existing
   hardware, software and skills. No lock-in to one ECM vendor or one stack which means when a vendor    tries to dramatically increase maintenance fees, organizations have a choice to go elsewhere.

The ECM Pricing Problem

Unfortunately, most ECM pricing models dictate multiple, complex pricing methods based on user, type of usage, intranet, extranet, website or compliance requirements. These models are typified by per user pricing  which is often called Client Access Licenses (CALs). In this model, companies are tied into paying the same cost for the employee who uses the software for one hour a year as the one who makes use of it for 24 hours a day. Firms will pay multiple times for a single user to use different software just to access or edit different content formats (such as Word and CAD files). There is often confusion with SharePoint pricing regarding the difference between Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) and the extra cost of support and maintenance. WSS 3.0 is freely available with Windows server 2003. MOSS adds extra functionality, but at a significant extra cost. Many of the advanced features users require are only available in MOSS, which can add hundreds of dollars per user to a company's budget. Furthermore, MOSS is available in  Standard and  Enterprise  editions and is also available as a hosted offering. It is important to understand the differences between each of these products to avoid incurring the entire cost of Microsofts CAL (Client Access License) model.

Methodology Used

This white paper will review publicly available pricing information and look at the cost of a typical basic
system with the ability to offer:
   · Office Integration;
   · Collaboration;
   · Content Management;
   · Workflow or Business Process Management;
   · Transformation/Rendition Management (Word to PDF, Flash etc.); and,
   · Search.

The analysis of ECM vendors pricing is conducted for a basic 100 and 1000 user configurations. For the sake of transparency, the product part numbers are shown for each vendor along with the pricing calculation. The URL for the price list used in the calculations is detailed in the Appendix. In the majority of cases, the analysis is based on publicly available pricing from the GSA Advantage website (see Appendix for more details).

Open Source Versus Proprietary Software

Open source software is growing in popularity in both the commercial sphere and the number individual end-users are increasing. The open source development methodology has been heralded by some of its proponents, such as EricRaymond[34], as a superior way of producing software code. Whether open source software is indeed faster, better, and cheaper is a matter of controversy. To begin with, what is open source? Roughly, it means that the source code is made public, and that the modifications made by its users also is turned back to the community. The details vary with the license adopted for the software. Some of the key criteria included in the Open Source Definition[30] are (a) the royalty free redistribution of the program, (b) the release of the source code, and (c) the requirement that all modifications be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Open source software should not be confused with shareware (which is freely distributed, but whose source code remains proprietary) and public domain software (which is not licensed and thus available to anyone without constraint).[25] The today common, proprietary software (or closed source) development methodology means that customers pay for a nonexclusive license which allows

Document Management and Web Content Management

Document Management

The core of both systems in this thesis is document management features, and this is a good choice of area to begin for better understanding of enterprise content management. This is more or less where content management began. In the early days, it initially dealt with the interface between printed document and computer systems. Today electronic documents are an integral part of business processes and document management systems include indexing and retrieval, workflow capabilities, versioning, document check-in/check-out, collaboration and distribution. Today’s systems are able to handle the relationship between documents and business processes, and are capable of managing the entire document life cycle. Features such as auditing, security and authorization, and document archiving, are as important as the content of the document itself. This sample will mainly focus on the Document Management capabilities when comparing Alfresco and the IBM based prototype