I gave a talk yesterday on using MOSS 2007 as an Application Delivery Platform. My contention is that delivering application functionality to your users is essentially the same thing as Enterprise Content Management (ECM).
Think about it...ECM is all about delivering the right information at the right time to the right people. If you simply exchange the word 'information' in the sentence above with 'functionality' you get my point.
If you work in the enterprise space you know the demands of a diverse user base can be overwhelming. Every day a new group springs up that needs a specialized application to do their job. Rough specs are developed and thrown over the wall to the development team with a budget and end date already fixed.
Often the application gets built somewhere near on-time but deploying the application is another story. Provisioning server resources, network resources, firewall rules, security review, change control, multi-level approvals, etc. takes almost as much time as developing the software!
Why can't we build an application delivery platform that utilizes the same semantics as ECM? Using MOSS 2007 as an enabler, you can.
Over the next few weeks I will be posting about our experiences making this vision come to fruition. It has been an exciting and (sometimes) painful ride...but the results have been very exciting!
More to come...