Since the Hyland Summit in Düsseldorf three weeks have already passed, but what are three weeks compared to three years…
At fme AG we are happy that we had the opportunity to join the first Hyland Summit after three years and get to talk to clients, new contacts and partners in person. Here’s my recap.

Our team was happy to meet a broad range of stakeholders in the European market, discuss new opportunities and meet many new people from Hyland while presenting our product Für die rote Klammer in Links migration-center and our Alfresco consulting services at our booth.

Should you have missed this event here are some of our impressions to fill you in.

Although impressive, these are only numbers. But what can we expect in terms of

• Strategy
• Trends
• Products
• Innovation
• Upcoming things

Let’s have a short look at each of these topics.

Strategy

Well, “we want to be the world’s greatest ECM provider” sounds at least ambitious, but yes, if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services, Hyland is for sure in the same league with Microsoft and OpenText. But watch out, it says “Content Services”! Microsoft may have Content Services, but they don’t have an ECM Platform. (Call us to talk about the difference!).

Currently, behind the scenes, a global scale restructuring process and a massive investment in the core products OnBase, Nuxeo and Alfresco is going on and as such, this goal may be reachable.

As a takeaway from the Hyland perspective: ECM is still on the rise and, even more than ever, customers need it to keep up with the ongoing digital transformation and disruption.

Trends

Looking at the market trends, Hyland identified at least:

• Hyperautomation (in short: Connect each and everything to achieve the highest possible automation of your content and information flow)
• The need to upgrade or replace outdated systems with less capacity or availability
• Innovation

The last two points are directly connected to “Moving to the cloud”. And that’s not surprising, if you look at all the other big players in the market.

Besides that, “Experience” is another important trend for Hyland. Let it be User-, Customer- or Employee Experience. Under the hood this transports a lot (Call us to find out what)

Products

Clearly the focus lies on

• Nuxeo
• OnBase
• Alfresco

That’s of course a very high-level perspective taking the underlying massive functionality of each of these Software Giants into account. But it’s notable that Saperion was not mentioned, and this may be bad news for existing Saperion customers.

But where to go from here, having at least three products which play in the same category of software? And that brings me to the next point of my little summary.

Innovation

The idea is that the customer, the user and the employee don’t have to care about what they use under the hood. All they want is to get their jobs done in an efficient way with a nice experience. 

Again, the cloud might be a key player here – and this is really great news – there seems to be a great focus on User Interface (UI) Design! At the end of the day people work with devices with different formfactors and intuitive UIs.  

This is where the Alfresco Development Framework (ADF) comes into the game. A toolset to build UIs in material Design for Alfresco. Hyland also mentioned a so called “Application Builder” that we might see in Q1 2023. Little do we know at this point in time, but it may be suspected, that it comes to a “One for all” – Application Design tool. And this one may span all three products.  

But this is, of course, only speculation. 

Upcoming Things

Think for yourself how the announced upcoming things fit into the big picture

• End of Share interface in 2025. Will be replaced by ADF
• There will be an ADF based control center for the Alfresco Content Services and Records Management
• Update of the Alfresco Process Services UI (soon)
• Replacing SolR with Elastic Search (-engine)

I hope that this summary was helpful for you. From our perspective this event was really successful, and we are looking forward to meeting many of you at the summit next year. Until then we are busy talking to our prospects and clients following up our interesting conversations in Düsseldorf last month.

Should you be interested in our Alfresco Consulting portfolio you can check it out on our > website.

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