Document Management Roll-up: Gov in Court with BPOS, SharePoint’s New Doc Web Part

By David Roe (@druadh20) Nov 2, 2010

This week competition between Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS heads to court, SharePoint gets new document management templates from HotDocs, while Gartner says the document outsourcing market is on the rebound.

Google, Gov in Court Over BPOS

Google and Microsoft continue to battle it out to see who is going to be the top dog in the hosted application space. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the two have ended up in court over the Government’s decision to adopt Microsoft’s BPOS at the Dept of Interior without letting Google bid for some of the action.

So, Google is heading to court while Microsoft (news, site) watches from the sidelines. According to the complaint filed by Google and its reseller partner Onix Networking, Google was shut out of the bidding process despite "numerous attempts" to enter the competition. Instead, the government specified that only Microsoft's BPOS-Federal service would be considered.

While there is only 88,000 employees involved — not a lot in the global scheme of things — exclusion could be a real problem for Google. After all, if it happened there, why not in other departments?

There is also the issue of BPOS and its rebranding as Office365. If Office365 digs into the public sector it is going to be very difficult to get it out given the kind of functionality it will be offering.

Last February, Microsoft announced plans to create a special version of the BPOS for federal government agencies that would meet required security standards. Microsoft was to run the Federal version of these BPOS services only out of data centers based in the United States.

Google has pointed out in the complaint that Microsoft's BPOS-Federal solution hasn't been certified to meet all of those security standards yet, while Google Apps for Government has. The outcome of this is going to be interesting, so watch and wait.

Document Outsourcing Rebounds

According to Gartner (news, site), document outsourcing is going to turn into big money next year. Gartner's Research indicates that the recession appears to be over, in this space at least.

Gartner’s analysis of the document outsourcing market indicated that the North American strategic document outsourcing (SDO) market is projected to total US$ 17.1 billion in 2010, a 1.7 percent increase from US$ 16.8 billion in 2009. Next year, it is expected to reach US$ 17.6 billion while climbing to US$20.1 billion by 2014.

SDO is the subset of business process outsourcing focused on the publication of customer communications. It includes content creation, multimedia presentation and incoming document processing.

Gartner indicates that behind the growth is a shift by enterprises and government agency clients to engage SDO providers as a means to cut costs. The most successful SDO companies will be those that can offer completely automated document workflow.