AIIM recently released their annual survey on the state of the ECM industry in 2009. AIIM is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control and optimize their information. I found the survey compelling on a number of fronts, mostly because it validates KnowledgeTree’s approach to the DMS market in a couple of key areas.

The first is cost. Compared to recent years, cost has become the most important factor in choosing a DMS, whereas previously it had been compliance. In recent calls with customers, I heard again and again that cost was a factor in selecting KnowledgeTree. More important than cost however, was value since many features found in much more expensive products (for example, robust workflow) are also present in KnowledgeTree.

Another issue cited in the survey was ease of implementation and ultimate user acceptance of the product. Many projects are derailed by long and complex deployments that don’t properly consider process and organizational issues around document management. We heard from our customers that it took less time to install KnowledgeTree than it did to unpack the server from the box! Once installed, it was easy to configure the product and set up the taxonomy (the structure organizing documents and document properties or metadata).

Disgruntled and disaffected users are death to any project. In fact, nearly 25% of survey respondents said their ECM project suffered from low user acceptance due to poor product design. Luckily, the learning curve on KnowledgeTree is short and users can come up to speed quickly with a familiar folder paradigm and integration with Microsoft Office applications they already use on a daily basis.

According to the survey, “ease of use” again topped the list of factors that most contributed to user satisfaction, with 60% of survey respondents agreeing that it was paramount. Our own research bears this out, as our customers remarked that KnowledgeTree was consistently easy to use and intuitive.

The survey focused quite a bit on the adoption of Microsoft SharePoint in the enterprise, and I’m going to come back to that in a subsequent post. We believe that KnowledgeTree and SharePoint can happily coexist, and again the research supports our thinking.

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