"When would you recommend an in-house solution and when would you
advise against in-house?

What advantages/disadvantages do you see for building an
Electronic Content Management system in-house?

What are your experiences in this area?"



Please allow me to put in my 2cents.   While I have been a subscriber to
the ListServ for a while, I have never entered the public arena.



As a person who has worked with both types of systems, I would strongly
recommend an off-the-shelf product.

An in-house DM product which our organization has took two years and many
$$ to develop in 1994.  There had been a staff of six + developers with
many other IT professionals who put together such a state of the art
product that our peer companies were wanting to purchase it.   That was
then, this is now.  Most of the developers were gone within three years and
to date all but one of the persons involved with the development of this
system have left the company.  The lack of updating this hybrid system to
meet current business needs has become an almost impossible task.

While the product was ahead of the curve in 1994, today it is a the bottom
of the back end of that same curve.   With such an large investment in the
"old" system it was hard to convince certain upper managment persons that
purchasing a product would be in the company's best interests.    We
finally got approval for the new software and purchased a very good EDM/RM
last year.  We found that migrating  legacy data from the hybrid system to
the new one is a real challenge.  Our old system lacks some features
currently considered "standard" which has meant that the migration of data
has taken many more resources (both in $ and in time) than we thought.

 With a purchased system, you can get updates, patches, tech assistance
anytime.  You won't have to rely on corporate memory of what was done to
what line of code to change an export utility.
 While planning and good intentions abound today....please remember the
folks who will follow.

Feel free to contact me offline for all the gory  details.



_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
  Beverly McMahan [Records Information Manager [ EOG Resources, Inc.[ 333
Clay, Ste 4200 [ Houston, TX 77002 [ 713-651-7010 (Desk) 713-651-7011 (Fax)
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