Migrating away from eRoom, Part 1: Loss

When I look to my customers I see that they still love eRoom. They use eRoom as a flexible tool for almost all collaborative tasks. And it seems that some of will continue their use of eRoom for a long time. Good to see that EMC also has committed to eRoom, there will be support for the next couple of years. I hope that the support will be better than that we have seen the last couple of years.

Other customers also still like eRoom, but they are in the situation the organization is replacing eRoom by other products like CenterStage, Sharepoint, Quickr or other solutions.

Most of them are facing a strange situation: No other product in the marked is and capable to contain all collaborative content from eRoom. There will be always a loss when content is migrated from eRoom. This loss could be loss of information, loss of functionality, loss of flexibility or other losses. For most organizations it is almost impossible to completely replace eRoom with other collaboration platforms within the next couple of years. Even EMC is unable to make CenterStage to a full eRoom replacement within the next couple of years.

One of the most common migration scenarios that is discussed in the moment is to operate eRoom in parallel to new platform that is expected to replace eRoom. I expect that most customers will decide to run the platforms in parallel for about two years. This seems to be also a very clever way to have a smooth transition away from eRoom.

To maintain two collaboration platforms at the same time is very expensive. How comes that customers decide to go that way? To be honest, I do not know but I have some ideas:

1.) Enterprise v/s Collaboration
Collaboration, as we know it from eRoom gives a lot of flexibility to the end user, this is what the user wants and likes. Enterprise wants to control all contents and processes. Even if flexibility was one of the best features of eRoom, other platforms offer a better control to the sake of enterprise needs. I will discuss this in detail in a later post.

2.) Structures
eRoom allows to create almost every type of content element in almost every other type of content element. Endusers user this feature very intensive to organize their work. The drawback of this is that contents in eRoom are hard to find after a couple of time. Newer concepts, as found in SharePoint and CenterStage do not allow to generate all content types on all levels.

3.) Collaborative Metadata
eRoom allows to add discussions, votes or files to almost all elements at all levels. For database entries other elements like traffic signs, approvals or member lists are allowed. This features allow users to generate many small sub contexts within rooms. This sub contexts can be at almost every item and only the users know about them. These contexts are almost impossible to migrate.

I see today no full replacement for eRoom. Migrations are always long projects where someone has to decide that content can be lost during the migration. To minimize the loss It could always be a good idea run the new platform and eRoom in parallel.

A Good Start

It seems to be strange to start a blog about eRoom just at the time when the successor of eRoom is lurking out of the door.
It is true that eRoom did not get any major updates the last couple of years. Well, the most visible update that came to eRoom when EMC took over Documentum and the eRoom Software was the new logo which now contains the name of the new owner.
It is also true that the successor of CenterStage is now released after years of new product development. But is this a reason not to blog about eRoom?

Yes, the collaboration business has changed during the last years, when eRoom did not get any further evolvement and CenterStage was this new product to bring collaboration into the Web 2.0 age. During this time EMC Documentum did not attend the competition in the collaboration marked. Other products came to the market at this time, products like Sharepoint which have not seen the best market acceptance a couple of years ago. Sharepoint seems to be now the new hot thing.
Other ideas of collaboration have been evolved the last couple of years, Wikis got important, Twitter came to live and google is trying to reinvent collaboration with the Wave.

There are lots of topics which are worth to blog about:

• Working with eRoom
• Using eRoom Extensions to enhance the possibilities
• Archiving eRoom contents
• Managing a eRoom installation
• Migrating eRoom to other systems
• Replacing eRoom with other collaboration solutions
• Integration into business processes
• Discussing about new collaboration ideas

I do not want to limit this blog to eRoom. But this is what I do most in the moment and this is what I am be able to share.
I expect that other collaborative platt form will find their place on this blog. I expect that the number of posts about Sharepoint will significantly grow over the next months. And, if the folks from EMC will do their work, CenterStage will also find the way to this blog.