I felt a bit sad – Interwoven was one of the few pure play CMS vendors and pioneered many of the Content Management concepts. Okay, so the products will still be there but you never know how they evolve in the context of a new setup. A lot of attention  is now on Vignette, the other major CMS vendor. I wonder, why is no one talking of Fatwire?

Lee Dallas calls this a consolidation in a different direction. Most others in this space have been with infrastructure vendors or with other related vendor. So in that sense, this brings in a unique differentiation for both these vendors. What could be interesting in this context is what now happens to Autonomy’s relationships with other CMS vendors. Many CMS vendors had integrations and OEM relationships with Autonomy and those will probably get redefined now. Similarly, Interwoven’s partnership with other search vendors (like FAST) will probably also get reviewed.

Even though Autonomy is known more for its search products, it also has offerings for BPM (Cardiff), Records Management (Meridio) and Digital Assets (Virage). So it would be interesting to see how and when overlaps are rationalized with Interwoven’s MediaBin, WorkSite and other related offerings.

In other interesting news this week, Alfresco released the final version of Alfresco 3 Labs, which among other things has Web Studio, a designer tool to build web application. But that is a topic of another post.

Verticalized Applications

Content Management Systems as horizontal solutions have been there for long and most known vendors provide similar features. The industry however is asking for more domain specific solutions built on standard CMS repositories. Based on this demand and the fact that this provides a differentiation to CMS vendors, I hope to see more and more domain or vertical specific solutions like Loan Origination, Claims Processing and other similar solutions/accelerators from many CMS vendors. Also, with the slowdown in economy, it is easier to sell a domain solution than a pure horizontal solution.

Portal and Content Consolidation

Many enterprises struggle with multitude of applications doing overlapping functionality. Organizations have multiple CMS repositories and many portals. This often leads to duplication of content varied user experience and huge costs. Because of huge cost pressures, many organizations have been considering consolidation of their content applications.

This will lead to following benefits:

• Reduced Hardware Infrastructure as you don’t need those 5 different ECM repositories
• Reduced employee costs as you do not need skilled people across 5 different portal servers
• Standardized processes and hence increased productivity
• Reduced employee training costs
• Unified User Experience
• Reduced Integration, Maintenance and Support Costs

I believe this could be a very important way to reduce and control costs as well as bringing in some standardization. So many organizations would start focused initiatives to consolidate their existing applications.

Open Source

Open Source Content Management and Portal solutions have matured quite a bit. Because of this and the fact that there is cost pressure on everyone, enterprises that would not even consider Open Source solutions are now more favorable towards them. They are becoming open to experimenting with technologies that are generally not considered *enterprisey*.  Many of the open source products are being tracked by waves and quadrants of major analysts and  that reflects a huge change. This is also good for the Open Source vendors because many enterprises use these analysts’ reports for shortlisting.  Many open source products have also released commercial versions and that is another reason that gives these vendors a foot hold within enterprises who did not want to use these citing lack of support options.

Another factor that encourages the use of Open Source products is that people want to quickly build “informal” applications which many commercial products can not do well. There are many popular Open Source (and free) products that do certain things much better.

Although, initial cost could reduce by using Open Source, organizations should carefully look at the impact over a longer horizon and should consider Open Source as another alternative in the market place. They should select Open Source based on overall fitment to their requirements and not just make a decision based on initial licensing cost.

Web 2.0

Widgets and Gadgets have been popular for quite sometime. Some products had gadgets much before portlet spec. I am sure many people have seen examples of counters, ad banners etc which are essentially widgets only. However, there is a considerable interest now in using these within the enterprises for more sophisticated portal like applications.

Currently, most social networking is horizontal – you become a member of a social network, I become one and we write scraps on each other. What next?  I believe Vertical Social Networking is becoming popular.  Some areas where we already see this or have potential are in the areas of Jobs, Real Estate and Classifieds. After all, It is easier to buy an old laptop from a contact’s contact rather than an unknown person who’s advertised in classifieds.

In order to reduce cost, many enterprises, especially those that require product support want to leverage the communities for customer support. They want people to help each other and come to their support only as a last resort. What this means is increasing use of tools that enable collaboration – wikis for example. Many enterprises are using these communities not just for support but also as a way to generate revenues.

Some organizations are also using web 2.0 as a means to Knowledge Management. Instead of regular process oriented KM which forces people to contribute, they want to use mechanisms that encourage people who in turn want to contribute. This is a huge shift – people don’t like contributing if they are forced to do it but are likely to contribute if they enjoy doing it. This also means a shift from “control and process” to “informality and accessibility”.

In spite of all this, I still think how to use Web 2.0 within the enterprise is still not very clear to many organizations and there is a huge scope for improvement. One of the reasons people cite is that workforce is used to applications that became successful on the consumer Internet and want to have same kind of experience for enterprise applications but they need to be very careful. Here’s a nice post by Vilas.

Alternate Delivery Models

There is more acceptance for SaaS based offerings. This is especially true for applications that are not business mission critical. Businesses are experimenting with SaaS based providers because this saves them dependence on their internal IT apart from other benefits like faster time to market, no capital expenditure, low risk and so on. Along with this,  alternate pricing models are also being looked at. Some examples are pay per document, pay per loan, pay per claim etc.

Standards

The portlet spec 2.0 or JSR 286 was released. Although the portlet standards (JSR 286 and JSR 168) have been relatively successful in terms of adoption and support, the content repository standard, JSR 170 has not been that popular. Meanwhile, vendors are collaborating on technologies that will help customers reuse existing investments. As an example, many vendors have come up with CMIS. Okay this is not a standard yet but is possibly in that direction. A standard like this is very much needed and hopefully CMIS will achieve what JSR-170/283 did not.

I would also hope that a standard emerges for Gadgets/Widgets.

Site Management and Personalization

Traditionally Content Management was decoupled from Site Management. However, marketing and business people now want more control and there is increasing convergence of Content Management and Site Management. This essentially means better user experience, rich and dynamic sites. This also means features like personalization are making a come back. This has also resulted because of cheap bandwidth and better client side technologies

Document Services

Document Composition and Generation is becoming part of mainstream ECM. There have been a few partnerships as well as mergers in this space. Related terms in this space are Document Output Management and Forms Management.

This was probably the last post of this year. Thanks for reading the blog and here’s wishing you a great year ahead.

Web 2.0: There’s nothing new about it as we’ve been seeing the impact of web 2.0 for quite sometime now. What’s new is the fact that Web 2.0  is also increasingly becoming popular behind the firewalls.  Many products have incorporated web 2.0 features and they are not limited to support for AJAX  front-ends. Many portals already integrate with Google Gadgets, Alfresco announced integration with Facebook which itself is getting a lot of attention.

SaaS: Software as a Service has become quite popular in some technology horizontals like CRM. It has now started getting noticed in the CMS space as well. Interwoven and Fatwire entered the SaaS space by acquiring other companies whereas salesforce.com, an established SaaS vendor has also entered the ECM space. There are many existing vendors like Spring CM and Xythos. With salesforce.com getting into this space, along with indications of entry of more established ECM vendors, technology buyers will have another option.  

Standards: There have been a lot of discussions in blogosphere about standards or the lack thereof. Although, there are many benefits of following standards, there are often trade-offs to be made and it may not be that a “Standards approach is always better”. We must bring a balance between the two approaches as there are important trade-offs to be made. And i still think JSR-170 (or its next version JSR-283) have not been as popular as they should be.

Open Source: There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. More and more people are using Open Source as a viable alternative to commercial products. In some scenarios, products like Alfresco, Magnolia, OpenCms and Liferay can give their commercial counterparts a serious run for their money.

Convergence: The lines between WCM, Portal, Web Analytics, Search etc are blurring. Many CIOs are asking for products that can do everything instead of buying multiple point solutions. However, more than technology, I think its the way an organization is structured which decides how easy or difficult is it to achieve convergence.

Google: We can’t complete this discussion without mentioning Google, can we? There are talks of a CMS by Google which already is an established player in associated areas of search, analytics, portal and collaboration.

Okay this was probably the last post of 2007. Here’s wishing you all a very happy new year.

1. The stake holders of different technologies are different at least in large organizations. For example, people who submit content for web site (and hence users of WCM) are different from folks in finance who use an ERP for end of the month reconciliations. Different groups, hence have different project life cycles and tool selection criteria. They seldom talk to each other to see if a convergent product could be chosen and hence different products get selected and implemented. In fact, because there are different groups, they some times select different products even for same functionality! Although, the technology is there, the businesses themselves are not structured so as to support convergence. So, what is the way out? One thing that could help is a task force, comprising of senior people from different groups in an organization. This could be like a PMO or operate in a shared services model and be responsible for creating standards, best practices as well as evaluating technologies.
2. The above point is one side of the story where convergence is actually not happening as fast as it could. However, the opposite is also true. We respond to almost 4-5 RFPs/RFIs a week and I have seen the trend that more and more people have requirements that span across different areas. Some vendors have responded to this by incorporating different offerings in their core products. This also came out in my discussions with Pranshu. Fatwire, for example has had an analytics engine for long and almost all Business Intelligence, Data warehousing, ERP and CRM products include a “portal like” interface. Many Search products have a portal interface and they actually use EAI technologies to index content across multiple repositories to implement a federated search. Integrate MS Office with a Data warehouse and you’ve got a simple records management/archival system because you can scan and store millions of documents. This is a simplistic example but in some sense, technology convergence is happening.
3. As things mature, maybe some of these things will become part of Infrastructure. The bigger vendors are already buying specialized vendors and integrating their offerings as part of their platform. Oracle’s Web Center already integrates with Siebel, Peoplesoft and other enterprise applications.
4. This again came out when I was discussing with Pranshu. Open Source could actually be driving some of this convergence. His example was that cost of clustering, in memory db etc is actually reducing because MySQL now provides it. So Oracle and MS SQL have to do more to earn their money. Same logic can be extended to convergence – Because open source products are providing many of the features that commercial products provide, so the commercial vendors have to provide that “extra” to differentiate.
5. How could “Web 2.0″ not have an impact on anything? Actuallly, things like RSS and OPML make it easy for you to aggregate content from varied sources using loose coupling and enable convergence at presentation layer.

All the above are just some examples. However, I think real convergence is actually much more than technology convergence. There are elements of business, people, governance and so on.

By the way, we also have a booth at the AIIM expo.  So if you are there and want to say hello, do drop in.

James McGovern had made some observations about a related post that I had written some time back. Here’s my take on some of those:

Should CMS should control BPM or BPM should control ECM? Doesn’t this require that both ECM and BPM products support industry standards to allow them to be embedded? If so, whom do you feel is best positioned to kick off the creation of such standards?

I think it will vary. I wouldn’t call it as one controlling the other but one of them will certainly be primary and the other one be secondary. If its a content heavy application and BPM refers to document driven processes then I would think CMS will be primary. However, if its a transactional application like an employee intranet where there are processes for say, employee reimbursement, employee travel and so on, I think BPM will be primary. For any of such decoupling to work, standards will play an important role. So if a CMS has to allow a decoupled version management or decoupled BPM then along with the CMS, the version management systems or the BPM also have to adhere to standards. I would think that large vendors who have presence in multiple areas would be best positioned to create standards. Obviously they would need a buyin form smaller niche players, industry and users.

Anything wrong with Subversion or ClearCase?

Not at all. When I mentioned CVS and VSS, I was only giving examples. This is not a complete list and others are okay too

Is this integration dynamic where all historical content is pulled from the version control system in real-time or simply check-in, check-out?

Hmm..okay there are two areas of version management in a CMS. One is the content (website, documents, images etc) and the other is the code that is used for development or customization of CMS. So for example, it could be XML files that define content types or templates that define how the site will look like. I was referring to versioning of code when I wrote about integration with external version management software. For content, I am perfectly happy to be versioned within the CMS. It is debatable though if code should also be considered as content and managed by CMS (CMS managing itself) but that is a topic for another post.

What’s wrong with the way portal products integrate with CMS products? If the portal has its own security model separate and distinct from CMS, how should they work together?

It really depends on how tightly the Portal and CMS are integrated. Actually I have been working on a longer article about CMS and Portal integration. I will share a link with you once that is done.

1. Standards: or the lack of them was evident. Although portal standards (JSR-168, JSR-286) have done well, content management standards (JSR-170, JSR-283) have not done that well. Alfresco, Magnolia, Day and eXo support JSR-170 and there have been occasional talks of JSR-170 connectors for other products (e.g., BEA supports this using Day’s connectors). However, I think the acceptance has been below my expectations.
2. Mergers and Acquisitions: After some small acquisitions, it was turn of some big time moves in this space. IBM’s acquisition of FileNet and Oracle’s buyout of Stellent were the big ones. Other notable ones were Red Hat’s (Jboss), Documentum’s (Authentica) and Stellent’s (SealedMedia). There wouldn’t be any change in the short term and choices for a buyer would not be any easier. Or would they actually become less?
3. Open Source getting more attention: Inspite of myths surrounding Open Source, it is actually gaining more respect in the enterprise. Alfresco has been active and has got an offering now that spans Document Management, BPM, WCM and Records Management and has created some sort of a benchmark for JSR-170. Sun Open Sourced JES (that includes Portal), Liferay and Jboss both improved their products.
4. Web 2.0: Web 2.0 has been quite popular with the consumer internet. However, the same consumer web technologies have started making inroads into the enterprise. Although, AJAX has been most popular of these, other aspects are also getting attention. The next version of Fatwire’s Content Server focuses a lot on so called “web 2.0″ – Blogs, Wikis, Social Computing, Tags and so on. Stellent and many other products have also announced similar features.
5. Usability: It’s not just how humans interact with computers anymore but how humans deal with devices. Focusing more on devices other than computers becomes even more important in countries like India where PC penetration is less than that of other devices. Although many product vendors are using AJAX and other rich internet technologies to make their interfaces more usable, people should remember that usability is much more than pretty looking interfaces.
6. Search becoming better and important: The position of search box is becoming more prominent. Instead of building their own search capabilities, CMS vendors have started decoupling it and in the process, giving more choices to users. IBM and Yahoo’s recent free offering is sure to give good competition to already established offerings from Google, FAST, IBM, Oracle, Autonomy and other vendors.
7. Software as a Service (SaaS): The trend towards SaaS has been growing. This is shown by the success of hosted CMS vendors and improved CMS like offerings from Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
8. Embedded ECM: Documentum and Alfresco have announced embedded ECM.
9. And finally Google: The year can not be complete without discussing Google’s impact. A product that integrates features of Blogger, Page Creator, Google Docs and Personal Home Page can be a good CMS. This when coupled with other Google products (Search, Gmail, Google Talk etc.) could be something!

Here’s wishing you all a very happy and prospersous new year.

Ah and BTW, one caution. Sites created by Google Pages have the url as http://gmailid.googlepages.com. Now, if you give a Google search for “site:googlepages.com”, you’d get all the pages in google index along with their gmail ids!

Updated Saturday, March 11, 2006: Google bought Writely recently. Using Writely, one could already publish to popular blogging tools, including Google’s own blogger. I guess they’s integrate it more tightly with Google Page creator too. I’d written about Writely and other such tools here. So what’s next? NumSum?

They already have APIs to access many of these features. With a couple of more acqusitions and some consolidation in different services they have, they might be a player to watch for in the PCM space.