I too am suspicious (and a little surprised) when I hear these terms together because, other than the fact that they are relatively new to the “enterprise,” blogs and wikis have little to do with each other…

I have had similar experiences. We often get RFPs and RFIs that have  statements like:

• “…. should support typical web 2.0 features”
• “… built on the principles of web 2.0 …”
• ” … release 1 should have basic web 2.0 features and release 2 should be a complete web 2.0 platform”
• Many more similar statements

Everyone has a different view of what web 2.0 means for them and so it is important to crystallize the requirements like one would do for any other set of requirements. Because of the fuzziness associated with the term 2.0 and the fact that there are too many options out there, coming out with well defined requirements is very important to arrive at a solution, cost, estimates, product selection and a successful implementation. This article describes the popular scenarios quite well.

I am optimistic though that the situation will soon improve. We are seeing trends which show that concepts of web 2.0 are increasingly getting popular with the enterprises. Many companies that require product support for their customers are turning to these tools instead of relying on more formal traditional customer support tools. Similarly, many companies are using these tools for Knowledge Management activities. 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.

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Liferay also followed and released an enterprise edition of its Portal product. The enterprise edition will be a commercially supported version of its free standard edition. This release also came with a newly done website as well as a new offering called Social Office (to be released soon) which extends Liferay’s collaboration features.

A major reason that hinders Open Source product usage especially among enterprises has been lack of commercial support. If a bank’s loan origination system is down, they wouldn’t be too happy to depend solely on community support! Alfresco already had this model and now with Acquia and Liferay having announced it, I think enterprises will increasingly consider open source products as viable options. After all, they will get benefits of Open Source and Community along with the promise of commercial grade support at lower price points. This also gives them the comfort that there is seriousness behind the product and not just a hobby-ist’s effort.

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… will define a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems.

This spec  will soon be submitted to OASIS. It has participation from IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and Open Source Alfresco.

Around the time when JSR 170 was released, I had written that many products have proprietary repositories and it might not be trivial for them to re-architect those to be JCR compliant. This seems to be an important consideration of this spec and thus CMIS is designed to be an abstraction over existing systems. So it does not require the products to make any major changes to their  architecture. It does not even try to make it mandatory to expose ALL features via CMIS.

There is also a recognition of the fact that many organizations indeed have multiple ECM systems and it is going to remain like that. So it might not be possible for everyone to consider migration and/or consolidation to a common repository.

Above all, it has support from Microsoft. And with a focus on REST, HTTP, ATOM it has that distinct feel of web 2.0, content mashups and so on.

So what does it mean for JCR? I’d like to believe what Kas Thomas has written on CMS Watch based on his interaction with David Nuescheler. In fact, the first ever draft implementation of CMIS is based on a JCR (Alfresco)! However, buyers of new ECM systems will now be less enthusiastic about the “support for JSR 170 tick mark” in their RFPs and that will mean reduced pressure on product vendors to support the JCR standard.

Also there is something that i’m trying to figure out and i’m hoping the experts can point me to something. All the diagrams, including the one here show how this spec aims to improve interoperability among different ECM systems by having an application that can access any CMS. However, doesn’t interoperability also mean interaction between the participating CMSs as well - for example, if CMIS enabled EMC Documentum and FileNet are involved and i check out a document in Documentum, the FileNet users will also see that document checked out. Or does this use case not make any sense? We have seen a lot of scenarios where a customer has multiple ECM systems and they want this ability via a common interface.

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1. McKinsey included Web services as one of the Web 2.0 tools along with Blogs, RSS, Wikis and others. Sure, Web services could form an important component of a Web 2.0 initiative but I don’t think it is a Web 2.0 tool itself like Blogs and RSS. 
2. Blogs, RSS and Wikis have seen considerable increase in usage from last year. Podcasts’ usage has also increased moderately whereas Peer-to-peer and Mash-ups’ usage has actually declined from previous year. Social Networking usage has more or less remained at the same level.
3. Web services usage has also reduced considerably. I think this is rather surprising. Shouldn’t companies be using more of web services now?
4. There’s some good analysis based on regional differences. For example, the usage of tools differ across regions. The regions across which analysis has been done are Europe, India, North America, China and Asia-Pac. India and China are considered as separate regions and for those people who are skeptical about the potential of this region, this is a good data point.
5. Tools usage varies across regions. Social Networking is more popular in North America as compared to APAC, China and India. Similarly Blogs are more popular in India and APAC as compared to other Geos. Video sharing and Podcasts are most popular in India! I am actually stumped by this- I would have thought that Video sharing etc would be more popular in North America and Europe which have better bandwidth and connectivity.

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If a product stack seems to have everything, it still might not have specific functionality that you might require. Read more here

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I recently heard about an Alfreco Drupal case study  and from my blog’s access logs, I’ve noticed people searching for “Filenet Drupal” and “Documentum Joomla” integration. There are numerous cases of “Sharepoint + Documentum” as well.

This clearly shows that Site Management and Content Management are increasingly becoming niche disciplines. Site Management is more about managing the end user experience while Content Management is more about the back end efficiencies. Business people need more control in the way the content is delivered to the end users - they want the look and feel to be flexible, want the ability to run campaigns, add functionality (Polls, Voting etc) and this trend seems to be catching up. The ease of use and simplicity that Site Management focused products like Drupal provide to create end user applications is simply not matched by more heavy weight products like Documentum and FileNet. Alfresco, though is trying to make improvements in this area.

There are obvious overlaps but vendors are also using these terms to  differentiate from competition in this crowded market. So for example, Fatwire does not sell Content Management, it instead sells what it calls ”Web Experience Management”.

From Fatwire’s perspective, I think it’s a good move.  Instead of trying to build Document Management features, they are building connecters to Documentum (and possibly others) and targeting to become the site management software of choice. They already have strong WCM capabilities and  features like Blogs and Wikis, some of which came as a result of Infostoria acquisition.

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This announcement though is an OEM deal. Here’s a nice post by Alan on what it means and what could be the future of this deal

There are lots of use cases where such an integration could be very useful, especially for customers of Adobe. When one creates a dynamic document using a product like this, one needs to manage both the raw data as well as output documents. So there are aspects like workflows, library services, metadata, search, version management, storage and archival. So if you are an insurance company that generates insurance policies or a Telecom provider that generates electronic bills, you need to be able to manage these and this is where a CMS is required. Most Document Composition products lack these features and hence often integrate with ECM products.

Apart from this, LiveCycle did not have a robust rules engine which is a essential requirement to dynamically generate documents based on certain rules. It can now use Alfresco’s rules engine (Alfresco rules or the bundled Jboss).

Alfresco  will also probably get a nice flex based front end which can also take advantage of its features (tagging, web scripts, blogs) and provide more compelling offering to build web 2.0 applications. But that again would be useful more for Adobe’s customers.

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Volantis now brings its well regarded Mobility Server (which it had open sourced recently) to power Ubik.com, a service that enables individuals and small businesses create sites for mobiles just like they are used to creating web sites. Volantis has a device library of more than 5100 devices and as a result, the site that is created is automatically “adapted” for viewing on a wide variety of handsets.

Once you create an account, you will be given a choice of many themes and templates. Unlike similar services for web, a template here is actually more than just about look & feel - it is actually a sample starter site with pre-built pages that can be used as a starting point for your site. While you are creating the site, you can do a mobile preview as well. It also provides the ability to upload images and multimedia files using MMS and/or email. When you are ready, the site can be published at http://sitename.ubik.net.

I also see that if there is a hyperlink to another page which itself is not on this site, it automatically tries to adapt it for mobile display. This probably means that there is a way to convert external, existing sites to be proxied via this service for mobile delivery. However, I was not able to find a straight forward way. I assume it requires the external site to have its output in some specified format (xdime?) but then i’m not sure.

This is a beta version and i’m hoping they will add some more useful features in future:

1. The site I create is only a mobile site. So I actually still need to create another one for the web using one of the other services. I would think that it should be easy to create a site for web and mobiles using ubik.com.
2. Ability to use my own domain name
3. Some dynamic templates would be very useful. Right now, I can only create a static site. As an example, a blogging template would be very nice to have.

Services such as these will indeed help in making the mobile internet much more popular. Now every one will be able to create a mobile site (and hopefully applications as well).

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However, these modules could be your biggest problem as well because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. There are around 4000 modules listed on Drupal and there are modules for doing many things - integration, collaboration, content, community, commerce and so on.

Read more about this on my post at CMS Watch.

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The situation is set to change with Google announcing its Friend Connect service. Like all other Google products, this too is in Beta (and preview release) and has a long wait list. This service will let you implement social features on your website without having to worry about coding and you will be able to invite friends from other popular social networking sites.

Facebook and MySpace had also earlier announced similar initiatives.

And there is focus on social computing else where too. With it’s version 5.0, Liferay also announced enhanced collaboration and social computing features. These include portlets with improved functionality for Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, a chat client, polls and other such features. All of these are based on the same underlying functionality for tagging, commenting, rating etc., which is very similar to Drupal. What this basically means is that irrespective of whether you are creating a blog post or a new article, you can use uniform features for categorization, rating and RSS.

Now it’s easier than ever to have your own Facebook :).

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