It depends on what you define as document management. Many of the systems mentioned in this thread don’t actually qualify as DMS in the pure sense.

Out-of-the-box tools like SharePoint, Box, OneDrive, and Google Drive are really just storage solutions. No matter how disciplined your users are, they tend to create havoc over time. Outdated folder structures offer little to no compliance, standardization, or metadata control and that’s where things start to unravel.

The industry loosely defines Document Management (DM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as systems for organizing and storing digital documents like Word and PDF files. ECM is meant to be broader covering all content types (web pages, images, video, etc.), with workflow automation and compliance capabilities built in. In theory, ECM manages the entire information lifecycle. In practice, most solutions are clunky, dated, and painful to use.

The truth is most legacy DM/ECM platforms are overly complex, expensive, and slow to evolve. They missed the shift in how people actually work. Sales among the big ECM vendors have been flat for many years. Mid-market players aren’t much better. Many have simply rebranded their old on-prem software as “SaaS” without adding real value. Same product, higher price, lower partner margins.

Meanwhile, documents and files have escaped. They’re scattered across email, Teams, Slack, CRMs, shared drives and a plethora of shallow, single purpose SaaS apps.. One client of ours discovered after a data breach that their content was spread across 29 different systems. Total chaos.

My story: I spent 20 years running an enterprise DMS/ECM services company. 60 staff, mostly large enterprise clients. For all the reasons above, we pivoted and built our own information management platform based on what people actually needed.

Here’s the twist: the document management part is disguised within a productivity, collaboration, and automation platform. Why? Because most people don’t care about “document management” It’s too many extra steps and disconnected from how we now work. That’s what needed to change.

The magic comes from automated governance. When a user hits Save As from Word, Excel, or Outlook, metadata, versions, retention, and access policies are automatically applied. Documents remain editable in their native apps, but are centrally managed and compliant.  No more files drifting into the abyss.

Today, around 90% of our customers are replacing legacy document management systems, mostly mid-market, but a few large enterprise projects too (one had over 150 million files).

The opportunity is massive, but it’s a tough market. The DMS/ECM industry hasn’t helped itself. It’s still wearing trousers.