The "places" where we work have changed and continue to change.  To those of you reading this blog entry on your iPhone, Nokia E-Series or Blackberry device, I don’t need to tell you that people are using their mobile devices for much more than phone calls and checking e-mail.  Maybe you’re reading this from your Outlook email client that you set up to pull in your CMS Watch RSS feed.  Or maybe you’re reading this because you saw the link appear in a Twitter dashboard like Tweetdeck or Seesmic.  The shift in where people are working is pushing ECM vendors to change their offerings accordingly.

One of the macro-trends that came out of our most recent Enterprise Content Management research is the push by ECM vendors to deliver content and functionality within ECM repositories and systems to end users in the environments where they spend much of their work time.  ECM vendors are responding to workers working on their mobile phones, within their e-mail clients, within their Intranets, or within their collaboration portals (SharePoint mostly).

While integrating ECM functionality into other applications is not exactly new, it is becoming almost a prerequisite for ECM vendors to offer a SharePoint connector or e-mail integration. This integration is mostly basic at this point. People can approve documents in an ECM repository via their mobile devices or e-mail, or check documents in and out of an ECM repository from within SharePoint.  We expect to see the breadth of these integrations to increase as fewer and fewer people work directly within their ECM system, or even on their PCs.

You can read much more about these findings in our 2009 market overview and individual product evaluations in The ECM Report 2009.